Publications of the Civil-Service Reform Association 

No. 5 


■$4 


THE TERM AND TENURE OF 
OFFICE 


BY 



iv' 


NEW YORK 
PUBLISHED FOR THE 

CIVIL-SERVICE REFORM ASSOCIATION 

BY 

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS 
1882 




OM « 











The Civil-Service Reform Association. 


Publications and Documents now ready (Nov., 1882). 
PUBLICATIONS. 

I. Purposes of the Civil-Service Reform Association, including 
its constitution. Per copy, 5 cts. Per 100 . . $2 75 

II. The Beginning of the Spoils System in the National Gov¬ 
ernment, 1829-30. (Reprinted, by permission, from Parton’s 
“ Life of Andrew Jackson.”) Per copy. Sets. Per 100 $3 00 

III. The Spoils System and Civil-Service Reform in the Custom- 

House and Post-Office at New York. By Dorman B. Eaton. 
136 pages, 8vo. Per copy, 25 cts. Per 100 . . $10 00 

IV. Civil-Service Reform in the New York Custom-House. By 

Willard Brown. Per copy, 5 cts. Per 100 . $3 00 

V. Term and Tenure of Office. P)y Dorman B. Eaton. Second 
edition, abridged. P6r copy, 15 cts. Per 100 . $10 co 

VII. The Danger of an Office-Holding Aristocracy. By E. L. 
Godkin. Per copy, 5 cts. Per 100 . . . $3 00 

DOCUMENTS. 

The Operation of the Civil-Service Rules in the N. Y. Custom- 
House : Report, made to tlie Senate, in March, 1881, by the Sec¬ 
retary of the Treasury. Per copy, 5 cts. Per 100 . $2 25 

Regulation and Improvement of the Civil Service : Report, made 
in February, i8Sr, by the Select Committee of U. S. Senate (Geo. 
H. Pendleton, Chairman). Per copy, 5 cts. Per 100 . $2 50 

Civil-Service Reform; a condensed statement for general distribution. 

Per 1,000 . . . . . . $3 00 

Daniel Webster and the Spoils System. An extract from Senator 
Bayard’s oration at Dartmouth College, June, 1882. Per copy, 3 cts. 
Per 100 . . . .. . . $i 50 

The “Pendleton Bill.” Bill to Regulate and Improve the Civil Service 
of the United States. Per copy, 3 cts. Per 100 . $i 50 

The “Willis Bill.” Bill to Prevent Extortion from Persons in the Public 
Service, and Bribery and Corruption by such Persons. Per copy, 
2 cts. Per 100 . . . . . . $i 00 

Report on the Expediency of Asking Candidates for Public Office, 
their Views on Civil-Service Reform. Per copy, 10 cts. Per 

100.$7 50 

Proceedings at the Annual Meeting of the National Civil-Service 
Reform League, 1882, with address by George William Curtis. 
Per copy, 10 cts. Per 100 . . . . $7 50 

Draft of Letter to Candidate for Congress. Two forms, each, ic. 

Draft of Letter to Candidate for State Legislature. Each, ic. 

Extract from Postmaster-General’s Report. Per 100 . 40c. 

Extract from President Arthur’s Inaugural. Per 100 . 25c. 

Petitions to Congress for Civil-Service Reform. Per 100 75c. 

Other publications will follow. 

Orders for the publications will be filled by William Potts, Secretary, 
4 Pine Street, N. Y., or by 

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS, Publishers for the Society, 

27 and 2g West Twenty-Third Street, New York. 






Reprint from The Penn Monthly.] 



O 

I z 
o 


THE TERM AND TENURE OF OFFICE. 

PON no subject within the sphere of civil administration is 



there a greater contrariety of views or a less instructed 


public opinion than in regard to the proper term and tenure ot 
office. Popular speech seldom discriminates between term and 
tenure, and even our statutes hardly escape confusion on the 
subject, plain as it is that term but marks the length of time for 
which the office is bestowed and tenure only the condition subject 
to which, for the prescribed period, it may be held. When the 
Federal Constitution declares that judges shall “hold their offices 
during good behaviour ” it creates a tenure, but not a term. It is, 
therefore, no contradiction to affirm of two persons that they hold 
office by different tenures, yet for equal terms. 

The term of the President of the United States and that of the 
humblest postmaster, nominated by the President, are each for 
four years ; but, so diverse is the tenure that, while only the judg¬ 
ment of the Senate upon an impeachment can sever that of the 
President, the tenure of the postmaster—frail as the holding of an 
autumn leaf,—may be severed any moment by the merest caprice 
of official authority; if not justly or legally, yet under the usage we 
have tolerated. 

The crude and discordant thought and the lamentable preju¬ 
dices among our people, concerning the proper term and tenure of 
offices, are what might well have been expected from the utter 
neglect of the subject in our teaching and literature. What 
institution of learning has ever given any instruction upon these 





2 


subjects ? Where have the5^.not—like everything else pertaining 
to administrative affairs—been treated as unworthy the attention 
of students and statesmen ^ahB fit only to be handed over to the 
politicians and partisan m|ijorjties ? 

In the early dehraites upon the Federal Constitution, the question 
of the proper term and ‘^tenure of the President, the members of 
Congress and the judges were well considered ; but little was said, 
and in the Constitution not a word, about the term and tenure of 
subordinates. Those matters—like the great power of removal 
itself—were left to mere inference and construction ; nor should we 
be much surprised. For the more than eighty thousand fed¬ 
eral officials, the hundreds of millions of annual revenues, the vast 
wealth and population and the immense volume of public business 
and official duties, expanded across a continent, which now give 
such subjects their perilous importance, were then not only un¬ 
known, but they were inconceivable. That power which we find 
so formidable and those parts of public affairs which now so alarm 
us, in the eyes of the framers of the Constitution, whom so many 
new and grave questions made anxious, only concerned a few dozen 
clerks, and only two millions of revenue. There were then 
neither parties nor chieftains nor great patronage, to make con¬ 
tentions. 

But may we not well be surprised that, in presence of the steady 
growth of such elements of peril—and especially that during the 
last forty years, within which personal corruption and partisan 
despotism have silently accomplished a demoralizing revolution in 

both the terms and tenures of the great body of federal officials_ 

there should not have been, either in our legislative chambers or 
in our political literature, a single presentation of the subject upon 
the basis of principle or policy; nor, indeed, hardly the least in¬ 
struction concerning it in our academies, colleges or universities ? 
Year after year our graduates have been committed to the sweep¬ 
ing currents of partisan politics, without principles, without ma¬ 
tured theories, without books of instruction, or even suggestions 
drawn either from our own experience or that of foreign nations. 
Neither in our great works upon constitutional law, nor in those 


SL 


0 


upon political ethics or science, is the subject thus presented, or 
in anyway treated as worthy of thoughtful study. Story and Kent, 
Lieber, Woolsey and Cooley alike—and our college text books as 
well—leave us without light or guidance on the subject. Indeed, 
so complete has been the neglect that there is hardly so much as 
a reference in the index of any standard work under the head of 
term or tenure of office. What, then, more natural than the dis¬ 
cordant practices and theories which have existed ? Judges of the 
Supreme, Circuit and District Courts of the United States, pro¬ 
tected by the Federal Constitution, retain their tenure of good 
i behavior; but the federal judges for the Territories, holding under 
I laws framed—the first of them in 1850—in the spirit of the mod¬ 
ern spoils system, are given a term of four years and a tenure ‘‘ at 
the pleasure ” of the appointing power; a provision which I must 
regard as being as repugnant to that Constitution, which says that 
Judges of the “ Supreme and inferior Courts shall hold their offices 
during good behavior,” as it certainly has been disastrous to 
the independence and character of the territorial courts. 

The Judges of some States hold during good behavior, those 
of others for only a single year, while between such extremes are a 
motley variety of tenures, and ever varying length of terms; changing 
not only with nearly every State line, but greatly within the same 
generation ,in the same State. New York, for example, in 1846, 
yielding to a spoils system policy earliest and most developed in 
that State, changed her judicial tenure from good behavior to a 
term of eight years, and, under a partial reaction against that 
policy, has since extended the eight years term to one of fourteen 
years. From the same causes, Pennsylvania reduced her judicial 
tenure of good behavior to a term of fourteen years, in 1850 ; but 
in 1874, so alarming had the evil effects of a short term become, 
that the fourteen years’ term was extended to twenty-one years. A 
contrariety, equally striking, is illustrated in most other offices. The 
terms of school officers, commissioners, mayors, State Senators and 
Governors, for example, vary in different States and cities from 
one year to six years, the extension made beyond one year in most 
cases—as, notably, in Pennsylvania and Missouri,—having been 


4 


resorted to as a check upon partisan intrigue and corrupt elections, 
which short terms had greatly aggravated. The whole official 
system of late years is without the evidence of accepted principles 
or matured thought,—as confused and miscellaneous as the surface 
of the earth, which volcanoes have upheaved and earthquakes 
have shaken. 

For much the same reasons, in nearly if not quite a majority of 
the States, sessions of the Legislature have been dispensed with 
for each alternate year. Nowhere, I believe, have official terms 
been shortened since public attention has been somewhat aroused 
to the evil of bad administration. 

Theories have been as discordant as statutes. On one hand, 
we see men insisting upon permanency in office as essential to effi¬ 
ciency and reform; on the other, those who denounce stability of 
tenure and length of term as an aristocratic monopoly. In the 
name of justice, they demand rotation in office. Some contend 
that only a fixed term of years can arrest disastrous cor¬ 
ruption and partisan despotism; while others insist that such a 
term would certainly increase both those evils. There are many who, 
aroused and alarmed as never before at the ruinous aspect of our 
politics, would directly appeal to Congress to enact a short fixed 
term of office for all subordinates in the executive department ; 
but there are yet more who would legislate concerning admissions 
and removals without, at this time at least, fixing any term by law. 
On one side, intense partisans tell us that parties cannot be sus¬ 
tained without being able to give many places to which a stable 
term and tenure would be fatal ; while on the other, the most can¬ 
did and thoughtful citizens assure us that parties may trust to 
sound principles and good administration, repudiating spoils and 
office mongering by which parties are only debauched and enfee¬ 
bled. The admirable resolutions of the last Massachusetts Repub¬ 
lican State Convention postulate the conditions of reform in the 
alternative, by declaring for a tenure of office during good beha¬ 
vior or for a reasonable fixed term,” allowing removals only for 
cause ; and, therefore, leaving open the main question: “ For how 
long a holding of office should the law provide ?” 


5 


We shall better see where the truth lies between such extremes, 
if, in the outset, we get a clear view of the sphere of Civil Service 
Reform and of the offices directly affected by it. 

A great proportion of those who regard patronage and spoils 
as essential to the life of parties, and short term and rotation in 
office as essential to patronage and spoils,—and, therefore, oppose 
all reform which would suppress such essentials,—are doubtless 
sincere and patriotic; but they are laboring under great misappre¬ 
hensions. Confusion of thought, or the neglect of thought, is the 
cause of most of their difficulty. We must, therefore, discriminate 
with some care, even at the peril of being thought didactic and com¬ 
monplace. 

I Official life,—government itself,—exists under three great 
divisions, civil, military, and naval. In the two latter, in all the 
foremost states of the world, patronage,—the bestowing of offices 
by mere favor—and short, precarious terms and tenure have 
given place, in later years, to selections under stern tests of 
capacity and to a system which requires the education and ex¬ 
perience which come from study and long terms of service. Those 
results were reached by slow stages. The commissions of 
our army and navy offices declare their tenure to be “ dur¬ 
ing the pleasure of the President.” Senator Benton says 
that tenure was based on British precedents and “ that it departs 
from the principle of our republican institutions, which requires a 
tenure during good behaviour a view which contrasts widely with 
that of some of the party leaders of our day. 

In Great Britain and in every other European state, down almost 
to the birth of men now alive, the tenure of military offices was as 
precarious and as much a matter of mere favor and patronage as 
that of civil offices. George III. and his minister Grenville but 
reflected the spirit of their times, in refusing to recognize any dis¬ 
tinction between civil and military officials on the score of tenure or 
term. Statesmen and generals had held the hope of pillage and 
plunder to be the most powerful incentives both to enlistments and 
to efficiency in battle, without the prospect of which no war could 
be safely undertaken. They reasoned concerning colonels, 


6 


captains and soldiers as our politicians reason concerning collectors, 
postmasters and book-keepers. George III., for example, deprived 
General Conway and Colonel Barre—sympathizers in our cause— 
of their commands for political reasons alone, and extended a re- 
tnorseless proscription to military and civil subordinates alike. 

A spoils system of office, in name and spirit, is only the repro¬ 
duction in the civil life of this Republic, of the barbarous out¬ 
grown feudal war code of the European monarchies. And, but 
for the stern lessons taught on our battle fields, who will venture 
to say that official terms would not now be as short, tenure as pre¬ 
carious, and the spoils system as potential in the army and navy as 
in our civil affairs ? Indeed, an act of 1862, not superseded with¬ 
out great effort four years later, did in spirit again take us back to 
the times of George III., in matters of army and navy patronage. 
Members of Congress have usurped the appointments to the 
national schools at West Point and Annapolis, to the great dam¬ 
age of those institutions; and have made their appointments, with 
the exception of a few competitive examinations conceded to pub¬ 
lic opinion, a part of their official perquisites, upon a theory which 
that King and his Minister would heartily approve. All the les¬ 
sons of the past, reinforced by the fine conduct and high educa¬ 
tional influence of the graduates of these schools, are none too 
strong for withstanding the demagogical, communistic demand for 
short terms and rotation in office in the army and navy, which the 
partisans and the spoilsman will forever seek to add to the vast 
plunder for which they wage the war of politics. Does any 
thoughtful man believe that if we continue to surrender civil ap¬ 
pointments to mere favor and influence, we shall long be able to con¬ 
fer naval and military appointments for merit ? It is an interest¬ 
ing fact that in Great Britain, a stable tenure and the giv¬ 
ing of office for merit were provided for in the Civil Service earlier 
than in the Military Service. Our military and naval, like our 
higher civil officers, may be removed at the mere pleasure of the 
President and Senate. 

Turning next to civil administration, it stands before us under 
three great divisions : Legislative, Judicial and Executive. Within 


1 


State jurisdiction in towns, villages and districts, these divisions are 
but imperfectly developed. Officials there may have duties not 
confined to one of these divisions. There, neither Civil Service re¬ 
form nor the principles which should control the terms or tenure 
we are considering, have more than a limited and indirect applica¬ 
tion. Yet, while we are directly dealing only with federal officials, 
the same reasoning applicable to them is largely applicable to the 
official life of the States and municipalities. 

The debates on the Constitution and the Federalist plainly show—r 
what perhaps is obvious enough in itself—that the stable and inde¬ 
pendent tenure (of the federal j udges, and the provision against 
diminishing their compensation), rather than a short, fixed term, 
were provided for the double reason, (i) that judicial duties are in 
objects and methods the same, and the judicial authority should be 
exerted in the same spirit and manner, at all times and under all 
circumstances; and (2) that such offices are in no sense represen¬ 
tative either of interests or opinions, or of times, classes or sections. 

The Constitution makes no provision bearing upon the terms or 
tenure of clerks, marshalls or other subordinates of the Courts, 
or of those serving elsewhere in the judicial department, except what 
is involved in the declaration that “ Congress may by law invest the 
appointment of inferior officers in the President alone, the courts of 
law, or in the heads of departments.” But it needs no argument 
to make it plain that every reason in favor of stability in the tenure 
of a judge, applies with undiminished force to all those who aid 
him in the performance of his duties, or are required to serve any¬ 
where in'the judicial department. 

The early statesmen unquestionably believed that the great 
principles of judicial independence which they had so plainly for¬ 
mulated would be applied to every minor official in that depart¬ 
ment. In most of the federal courts, that expectation has been 
realized. The federal judges have been given the power to 
appoint and remove their subordinates. They have been allowed a 
stable tenure more generally than the subordinates of either other 
department. And who will deny that the federal judiciary has 
better kept within its sphere, has fulfilled its great purpose more 


completely, has withstood the spoils system more effectually, and 
has consequently preserved itself more absolutely unstained, and 
added more to the strength and glory of the nation than either of 
the two other great departments ? To this noble record, the his¬ 
tory of the territorial judges and their subordinates, and of marshalls 
and the district attorneys, presents a painful contrast. Made depend¬ 
ent upon party politics, by a term of office in violation of the spirit, 
if not, as to the judges, in violation of the letter of the Constitu¬ 
tion, they have been forced to yield to mere personal and political 
influences. But I have no space for the subject. 

How great and lamentable has been the departure from the 
principles of that Constitution, in the judicial administration of the 
States, is known to all. The corrupt influences which enabled 
Jackson and Van Buren to set up the spoils system at Washing¬ 
ton and to seek popularity by proclaiming the seductive doctrine 
of rotation in office as a principle of justice, had long been 
demoralizing the politics of the States, and, worst of all, the politics 
of New York where that system originated. 

As early as 1808, Van Buren bartered his services to Tompkins 
for a judicial office. In the great contest between himself and 
Clinton, for the first time in our history the bench was dragged 
into the defiling pool of politics, and judges became reckless par¬ 
tisans. Judicial appointments thus made venal, respect for the 
judiciary thus impaired, and a voracious, insatiable appetite for 
office thus stimulated, a rapid revolution was accomplished in our 
State judiciaries. Before 1830, no State judge had ever gained 

his office by popular vote. Now the people of twenty-four states_ 

equal to the whole number then in the Union—elect their judges 
for fixed terms and by popular vote. If in later years the first short 
terms have been lengthened at every opportunity for constitu¬ 
tional amendment, it has been by reason of the disgust and alarm 
caused by making judicial offices a part of the spoils for which par¬ 
ties contend. The average length of judicial terms now reached in 
the States is about ten years, and the demand for a more independ¬ 
ent tenure is rapidly growing more potential where short terms 
exist. 


9 


The same influence which forced the judges into politics, and 
made their tenure precarious, was not less disastrous among judi¬ 
cial subordinates. In New York; especially,—but in every State 
in proportion to the despotism and corruption of its politics—the 
true interests of the people have been spurned, and neither term 
nor tenure has been allowed which could interfere with the will of 
the chieftains or the interests of partisans. Salaries have been 
made high that they might be assessed to fill the party treasury. 
Terms have been made short that managers might have more pro¬ 
fitable elections to conduct, that chieftains might have more offices 
for bribes, that their vassal lawyers might have more chances to get 
upon the bench. Tenure in subordinates was measured by ser¬ 
vility. A new and demoralizing element was added to the exces¬ 
sive and feverish activity of municipal politics. Election bullies 
were made court officers, that they might be at hand when ordered 
to do the dirty work of politics. Character fit to serve in the 
temples of justice, and capacity and experience competent for the 
litigation of the people, were alike sacrificed to a scandalous de¬ 
moralizing practice under which every place in the courts was ap¬ 
portioned, as if prizes of war, among the victors in the fights of 
faction. For years, the subordinate places in the Courts of New 
York have, as a rule, been so apportioned among the faction 
generals who led the voters at the judicial elections. When Judge 
Barnard, on his trial under impeachment, answered on the subject 
in these words: “ This is my Court; I have won this office, this 
patronage is mine,” he explained the whole system, which is yet 
only checked. Of all the sad consequences, perhaps the most 
lamentable have been the loss of popular respect for the courts, of 
a lofty ideal of what they ought to be. Can any man point to a 
single benefit which has come to litigants, to parties even, from 
this revolutionary departure from the principles of the Constitution 
and the fundamental conditions of justice ? 

II. Turning next to the legislative department, we find decisive 
reasons why the terms of those elected to represent the people 
should not be long. These officers represent interests, opinions and 
policies, which are constantly changing ; and, at every phase, they 



10 


have an equal claim to be represented in debate, and to be exr 
pressed in statutes. Pern^anency of tenqre on the part of legis¬ 
lators would obviously delec|.t one of the great ends of represen¬ 
tative government. Stability in office is inconsistent with absolute 
representation. Yet, so manifest have been the advantages of that 
wisdom and facility which come from experience in legislation, 
and so deep the sense of peril from incompetent legislators, that a 
great portion of these officers,—notably Senators, both State and 
Federal,—have been allowed to hold their places for terms during 
which great changes of interests and opinions have taken place. 
So strong has public opinion been in this direction of late that, in 
the States, the terms of Senators, Mayors, and school officers, and 
of various other officials, have been much extended within the 
last few years—perhaps nearly doubled since the reaction against 
the spoils system theory of rotation first began. Biennial sessions 
of the Legislature are due to this cause. 

Despite these changes, the vast volumes of crude statutes,— 
more than a thousand pages a year in a single state,—causing dis¬ 
tracting doubts and needless litigation in the courts, by which justice 
is made remote and uncertain, proclaim the incompetency of law¬ 
makers. It will be in vain that a remedy will be sought in limit¬ 
ing legislative power by constitutional amendments. As the 
statutes become more intricate and life more complicated with our 
growing wealth and population, we shall more and more feel the 
need of larger experience and longer official terms—to be held 
under a sterner responsibility—for the supreme work of legislation. 

But, in the legislative department, there are inferior officers 
not elected by the people,—the clerks and other subordinates of 
Congress, State Legislators and municipal councils,—who are in 
no sense representative, bui simply ministerial. Next to charac¬ 
ter and natural capacity, the highest qualification for these places 
is experience—invaluable experience—in the discharge of their 
duties. These duties have no honest relation to party politics, or 
to majorities in legislatures, but are the same at all times and 

under whatever dominant party. Our Constitution,_like that of 

Great Britain,—confers the power of their selection and removal 


II 


upon the legislative chambers without restriction as to term or 
teni^re. Who will deny that economy, efficiency, purity and dignity 
in legislation alike demand that these officials should hold their 
places so long as they fitly perform their duties, and that they 
should be made to feel it to be a disgrace to allow that perform¬ 
ance to be influenced by partisan considerations ? 

Before the British spoils-system was suppressed by the reforms 
made within this generation, there had been as demoralizing con¬ 
tests in the British Parliament over the appointment and removal 
of such subordinates, as have ever disgraced our Congress or State 
Legislatures. Now, holding during good behavior and efficiency, 
the selection of these officials in Great Britain is by methods which 
no party controls, and the discharge of their functions is treated as 
having no political significance. Parliament has now more time for 
its great work, and its dignity is no longer dishonored by ignomin¬ 
ious contests about clerkships and doorkeepers. I have no space 
for presenting the evils which have come to us from treating these 
offices as the mere spoils of legislative majorities and partisan 
chieftains. Demoralizing intrigues, corrupt bargains, acrimonious 
debates, disgraceful scenes in the halls of legislation, law makers 
discredited in the eyes of the people, years of time required for 
improving the laws worse than wasted, incompetence, and disas- 
trious mistakes on the part of the partisan officials selected—all 
these darken the record of our legislation and bring discredit upon 
republican institutions. In Congress, of late, we have seen one 
party, in order to obtain offices for its henchmen and favorites, 
drive from their places worthy and experienced clerks, who had 
been made cripples for life on the battle field of their country ; 
and the other, disregarding the needs of the public service, seeking 
to force into office such new officials as would most influence the 
local politics of a State. Nor was this the worst; the country has 
been pained at the spectacle of a great part of a session of the na¬ 
tional Senate given to an acrimonious, demoralizing contest,— 
sinking at last through the dark hours of the night into something 
like a test of physical endurance—over the appointment of its sec¬ 
retary, in which the. merits of the candidate—the only legitimate 




12 


issue—was forgotten in the angry storm of partisan and irrelevant 
contention. Yet we would not count all this as utter loss—any 
more than we do the suffering and death of our late noble Presi¬ 
dent—if only it has made us feel more deeply the peril of further 
departing from the spirit of the fathers and the theory of the Con¬ 
stitution,—if only it has awakened in us and those who represent 
us a higher sense of what is becoming in the most conspicuous 
place of statesmanship. 

One other reflection upon the legislative department is impor¬ 
tant. It is by its members, elected by the people, that all laws are 
enacted, all appropriations are made, all salaries are fixed, and all 
ordinances and regulations are authorized, subject to which every 
department of the Government is carried on and every official duty 
is discharged. It is in this department that the great repressing, 
stimulating and moulding forces of a nation, which utter its will, 
express its character, give direction to its power and policies—on 
which all liberty, justice and safety depend—find their ultimate 
sanction and strength. Government, under liberal institutions, in 
its comprehensive potential sense, is carried on in the legislative 
department. The judiciary but declares what the legislature has 
said or sanctioned. The Executive but executes what the legisla¬ 
ture has authorized, or the people consistently there withbave approv¬ 
ed at elections. It is only demagogues seeking popularity, partisan 
officials seeking influence and spoils, and thoughtless people 
blinded by false theories, who regard government as getting office, 
holding office, and bartering office for votes. 

If from the more exalted we turn to the humbler sphere of 
government, we find it in villages, towns and districts where the 
people directly select and instruct and supervise their public ser¬ 
vants, whose duties are not merely legislative, but combine, in 
some measure, the functions of the three great departments of gov¬ 
ernment. 

No thoughtful, candid man can affirm that, so long as the people 
can elect, instruct and call to account every official, from the town 
selectman and the village trustee to Governors, Congressmen and 
Presidents, and change every method and official through which 


13 

government acts, there can be any interference with the preroga¬ 
tives of the people or any danger to their liberty by insisting that 
executive subordinates and the ministerial clerks and servants in 
the other departments shall be selected for their merits and retained 
so long as they are most serviceable to the public. 

Who, but officers of the legislative department, have authority 
to reduce salaries, to dismiss supernumeraries, to provide for and 
enforce economy, to prevent offices being given as bribes, to make 
official responsibility more severe by stern investigations and penal 
laws, to expose all kinds of abuses in public debates in whatever 
department they exist ? Whose fault will it be, but that of legisla¬ 
tive officers, if these powers shall not be vigorously exercised ? 

Let us here clearly see the need of making it plain to the people 
that competitive examinations and the other practical methods of Civil 
Service Reform do not interfere between the people and the officers 
they elect—do not touch upon legislative discretion—do not in the 
least limit or obstruct the capacity and duty of representatives to 
be true to the interests, opinions and policies which they are bound 
to respect. The citizen must forever remain the sole judge of the 
fitness of the candidate for whom he can vote. 

Competitive examinations and the other methods of Civil 
Service Reform, so essential in the cases of the tens of thousands 
of executive and ministerial subordinates in the great offices and 
departments, who now gain their places secretly through favor and 
influence—as to which the people have neither part nor informa¬ 
tion—can never be necessary or useful for the selection of the 
officials of towns and villages. Everything is there so open, and 
all official duties are so simple, that the boys on their way to 
school, and the women over their wash-tubs, may discuss them in¬ 
telligently. And for the very reason that these official functions 
are so simple that any one may readily discharge them, and that 
they rarely require the abandonment of the accustomed business 
of the local officer, it is practicable and desirable that his term of 
office should be short. In a limited way, the doctrine of rotation 
may be here accepted, and it has the advantage of causing more 
persons to acquire valuable information concerning public affairs. 



14 


It is a part of the art of the demagogue to plausibly represent that 
methods and tenure, essential only in the great offices, are intended 
for interference between the people and these town and village 
officials at their own doors. It is an utterly false representation. ] 

In leaving the legislative department for the executive, there is | 
another view of its official life, important to be carried with us. 
The most perfect representation—which in theory is sought— 
would be attained by the shortest possible terms of office. Terms 
of six years for federal senators, two, three and four years for 
State ' Senators, of two and three years for Governors, mayors 
and various other officers, as is now the case, cannot be justified 
on the mere theory of representation. That theory is based on 
the right of the people at all times to have their interests and opin¬ 
ions reflected in the halls of legislation. Now, terms of only one 
year—the shortest we recognize—violate that theory. For the 
opinions of parties and individuals do not, like grass and fruits, 
grow and ripen, or, like the earth, complete a revolution once a 
year, but often more frequently. When Rhode Island, follow¬ 
ing the example of the Grecian Republics, fixed the terms of her 
representatives at six months, and Connecticut added to those short 
terms semi-annual sessions of her Legislature, each at a different 
place, for the more convenient and exact representation of the peo¬ 
ple, and when the factious spoils system spirit of Florence and other 
medieval republics of Italy reduced official terms first to six, then 
to four, and finally to two months, they obviously enforced a term 
tending to a more exact representation than any now provided for 
in this country. 

Our longer terms for such offices are justifiable only on the 
assumption which they proclaim, that the experience secured by 
larger public service is more valuable than any ideal exactness in 
representation; an important truth as bearing upon the proper term 
of mere ministerial and executive subordinates, and one which 
Senators will do well, if they do not longer forget, when they 
stand up in their places, in the fifth and sixth year of their terms 
—perhaps long after the majority in the State and Legislature 
which they pretend to represent has been changed since their 



IS 

election—and, in the name of justice and sound policy, demand 
rotation, removals and short terms on the part of those subordi¬ 
nates who represent nothing but the unchanging need of having 
the constant volume of public work well done, and done in the 
same way year after year, whichever party is in power, and what¬ 
ever policy prevails. 

I say well not longer to forget that fact, because, if we go much 
further in teaching the people the communistic doctrine that every 
man has an equal right to office and that every officer belonging 
to the defeated party should go out when the other party prevails, 
the plausible and insatiable demand for office, sure to be aroused, 
will not stop at subordinates, but will cut down the terms of Gov¬ 
ernors, Senators and Judges as well. That doctrine bears the seeds 
of a communistic revolution in official life. 

III. And now for the executive department. To approve and dis¬ 
approve legislative enactments, are the highest functions of 
Governors and Presidents. To that extent they are both legislative 
and representative officers. Next in importance is the duty of 
those officers to carry into action, in the conduct of executive affairs, 
the principles and policy which the people approved in their elec¬ 
tions. This, too, is in a sense a representative function. Much the 
same reasons, therefore, which require the terms of a legislative 
officer to be short apply also to Presidents and Governors ; in a 
limited degree they apply to Mayors, also. In limiting the term of 
the President to four years our Constitution presents decisive 
evidence that considerations drawn from his representative rather 
than from his strictly executive functions prevailed—must we not 
say unwisely and disastrously prevailed —to the extent that it made 
his term shorter than that of a Senator. 

The Constitution has fixed the term of no officer in the execu¬ 
tive department except that of the President and Vice-President. 
It created no department; yet says “ the President may require the 
opinion in writing of the principal officer in each of the Executive 
Departments upon any subject relating to the duties of their re¬ 
spective offices.'’ Upon this narrow basis and the precedents of 
the British Cabinet, our Cabinet has been reared ; and while each 



i6 


of them are equally unrecognized in the Constitution and laws, 
(and with us the duty and responsibility are upon the President 
alone,) the Cabinet has been, in practice, in both countries the 
great central council for advice in regard to all executive action. 

It is too clear for argument that the heads of departments, who 
are to advise him as to his gravest duties, need to have faith in the 
principles and policy the President is bound to enforce, and for 
that reason their tenure of office should depend upon him. 

There may also be a few other executive officers—foreign min¬ 
isters, or more clearly those sent on special missions, and Gov¬ 
ernors of Territories might be examples—whose peculiar fitness, if 
not success, would depend upon their sharing the views of the Ad¬ 
ministration ; and in all such cases there should be short terms or 
a tenure in the discretion of the President. 

When we go below these, we come upon officers who, not only 
according to the theory of the Constitution and the laws, but from 
the very necessities of government, are required to obey the legal 
instructions from those above them to whom they are directly re¬ 
sponsible. Each head of a department is clothed by law with 
the authority and duty of directing the official action, subject 
to the constitutional power of the President, of all the subordinates 
of that department. Among all the eighty or more thousands of 
subordinates standing in graded ranks from the department secre¬ 
taries down past great collectors and postmasters to the custom¬ 
house janitors, the light-house keepers, the postmistresses in the 
hamlets, the keepers of signal stations on the* tops of mountains 
and of life-saving stations on the shores of the oceans and the lakes, 
there is not one who, according to the laws or sound policy, has 
any right of advice as to the policy or principles of an administra¬ 
tion ; not one for whom obedience to legal instructions from a supe¬ 
rior is not a plain duty; not one whose political opinions are mate¬ 
rial for good administration; hardly one whose active participation 
in partisan politics is not a public detriment tending to neglect of 
public businessand the oppression of the citizen. The duties of these 
officers, I repeat, are in no sense representative. They are not 
called upon to act upon any political theory. They perform no 


17 


» 

duties that depend upon the triumph of political opinions or the 
success of any party. Whichever party comes into power, what¬ 
ever party they belong to, their duties are the same. They have 
no right to regard the opinions of any citizen in their official action, 
or need to know them. They do not, like legislators, or town and 
village officials, meet at stated seasons, or convenient times, to con¬ 
sider changing interests and fluctuating politics, but month after 
month and year after year, they do, or they should, steadily devote 
themselves to the same branch of that vast unchanging public busi¬ 
ness, which, from the smaller officers to the greater, moves on like 
streams and rivers in an unbroken succession and everlasting con¬ 
tinuity. Indefensible as political indifference is in the citizen, we may 
unhesitatingly affirm that, so far as the mere discharge of official 
duties are concerned, these 80,000 officials would not be less use¬ 
ful public servants if they had neither opinions about politics nor 
share in party affairs ? We may not, as was found necessary in 
England for a hundred years, disfranchise them, but we should 
clearly see and make them see, and make them feel also, that they 
not only need not, but should not, as officials, interfere with party 
politics or regard political opinions as qualification for ministerial 
duties. 

Before considering what should be the term and tenure of this 
vast body of federal officials—referred to in the National Constitu¬ 
tion as “inferior officers,” and to which a much larger number of 
State and municipal officials holding like relations should be 
added—it will be well to notice some objections which stand in the 
way of considering the question of term and tenure upon its own 
merits. It is declared that any term and tenure which prevents 
inferior officers being removed and their successors appointed at 
the pleasure of the majority, disastrously restricts the freedom 
of action on the part of the great parties, and deprives them and 
the people of essential representation in the official life of the 
country; and further, that the establishment of competitive ex¬ 
aminations, as the Civil Service Reformers propose, is an equally 
unjustifiable restriction. 



i8 


The answer is not difficult. Under our institutions parties are 
inevitable and salutary. Their great functions are to arouse, em¬ 
body, sustain and carry forward a sound public opinion until it 
finds fit expression in statutes and executive action. 

Under these institutions, the federal and State legislators and all 
who govern in municipalities and towns, are selected by the vote 
of the majority, which majority in itself but expresses the will 
of the dominant party. In the selection of Mayors, Governors, 
and Presidents, that party majority is equally potential. These 
two classes of officers, the one wielding all legislative authority, 
and the other all executive authority, in their united action exert 
all the power which our institutions give, or a free people can safely 
confer, for the representation and enforcement of their will. All of 
these officers may be, and in our practice they generally are— 
within their respective spheres—the trusted favorites of the domi¬ 
nant party, bound in the double allegiance of gratitude and de¬ 
pendence. 

Through these two classes of officers, the adherents of the 
dominant party practically make and repeal all laws and ordi¬ 
nances, direct their enforcement, fill every subordinate place, in¬ 
struct and require obedience from all who hold them, enforce all 
principles and guide all policy in obedience to which the vast affairs 
of the nation, from the lighthouses and the signal stations to for¬ 
eign embassies and the great departments are conducted. Is not 
this enough ? Have we ever suffered because parties have needed 
opportunities or influence greater than these ? Is not here a sphere 
broad and grand enough—a power and opportunity dazzling enough 
—to inspire the patriotism and reward the zeal of any party and of 
the noblest man who ever led any party in a great nation ? 

Let it not be said that competitive examinations or doctrinaire 
Civil Service rules block the way. For, I repeat, they in no way 
interfere with the elections or proper official action of any of these 
party-elected law makers or executive leaders, federal. State or 
municipal. 

These examinations and rules stand in the way only when par¬ 
ties and their leaders—fearing to rest their fate with the people 


I upon any sound principles they have sustained, any good adminis- 
! tration they have enforced, any worthy persons they have put in 
office, or any wise laws they have enacted—attempt to perpetuate 
I their power by filling the inferior offices with partisan henchmen 
potential at elections, by pledging and bartering appointments for 
votes, by converting the civil servants of the people into their 
oppressors, by levying exactions upon these servants for executing 
the coercive policy of chieftains and factions, for whom the people 
refuse to contribute. 

Unless, therefore, it is claimed that a party, which cannot gain 
or retain power by adhering to the spirit of the Constitution and to 
common honesty and justice, may strengthen itself by using public 
authority to debauch and coerce the people—unless it can be shown 
that the term and tenure of these “ inferior offices ” should, in the 
interest of parties, be made brief and precarious so that patronage 
and the appointing power may be conveniently prostituted as mer¬ 
chandise in the shambles of partisan politics—we may confidently 
; declare that their term and tenure alike should be determined 
j quite irrespective of mere party considerations. 

But let us not imagine, because these inferior officers are not 
representative or given large discretionary powers, that their term, 
tenure or relations are not vital and perilous. A glance at the evi¬ 
dence to the contrary will dispel all doubts as well as shed 
some light on the true relations between term and tenure and 
the approved methods of Civil Service Reform. It was the political 
assessment of the 80,000 officials which President Grant prohibited 
by executive order, which President Hayes declared to be “ gross 
injustice to the officers” or “indirect robbery of the public treas¬ 
ury,” which President Garfield denounced as “ shameful” and “the 
source of an electioneering fund which in many cases never gets 
beyond the pockets of the shysters * * and mere camp follow¬ 

ers of the party.” It was these assessments in vast aggregates^ of 
hundreds of thousands of dollars, levied on the more than 2,500 
federal officials, and thfe two and a half millions of their salaries at 
New York City, helped by like extortions from the 12,000,000 
salaries of State and municipal officers at that city—their pre- 




20 


carious, humiliating tenure degrading many of them into mere 
partisan vassals—which made possible the unparalleled corruption 
and despotism of New York politics, and led directly to the 
rebellious madness of her Senators in confronting the President and 
deserting their posts of duty for a faction war of treason at home. 
It is by reason of the crowding and bullying for these offices—in¬ 
vited and intensified by the frail tenure of those who fill them— 
that our late lamented President declared deliberately, in the 
Atlantic Monthly in 1877, “ that one third of the working hours of 
Senators and Representatives is hardly sufficient to meet the de¬ 
mands in reference to appointments for office.” He further 
declared his belief that with a “judicious system of Civil Service, 
the business of the departments could be better done at almost one 
half the present cost.” It was the applications for these offices 
which the New York Tribune lately declared had occupied one- 
third the time of President Garfield ; which one of his secretaries 
has stated had occupied more than one-half of his own time ; which 
another declared had been the subject of seven hundred and ten out 
of less than seven hundred hundred and fifty calls upon him during 
the first three months of his official service. It has been the ex¬ 
pected facility of breaking the fragile tenure of these offices, which has 
drawn unprecedented numbers of office-seeking men and women to 
Washington within the past few months—the office-soliciting ad¬ 
vertisements of impecunious women in a strange city, separated 
from their families, now being openly published in the newspapers 
of the national capital, in which, in their need and desperation, they 
promise one-fifth of their salaries, and to back their claims with the 
influence of members of Congress, as a condition of getting one of 
those offices. It was the general eftect of the intrigue, solicitation 
and coercion for these offices without stable tenure which Senator 
Pendleton, of one party, in a late speech declared to be “ the pro¬ 
lific parent of fraud, corruption and brutality. ... It made 
Guiteau possible. ... It has debauched the public morals. 
... It drives Senators and Representatives into the neglect of 
their chief duty of legislation . . . and too often makes the 

support of an administration conditioned upon their obtaining offi- 


21 


ces for their friendsand of the same abuse that Senator Dawes, 
of the other party, in his late letters said, It destroys his (the 
Congressman’s) independence, and makes him a slave.” 

It needs no argument to make clear the intimate relations which 
exist between such abuses and the term and tenure of these ‘‘ infe¬ 
rior offices.” 

These are the decisive questions: What, intrinsically consid¬ 
ered,* are the proper terms and tenure of these officers ? In what 
way should such term and tenure be modified by reason of these 
abuses ? What is the relation between such term and tenure and 
competitive examinations and the other practical methods of a true 
Civil Service Reform ? 

We have only to consider the great variety of officials to see 
that to most of the general rules we may lay down there must be 
some exceptions. The officers classed in the State department 
range from the Secretary and the Ambassadors to the Consular 
clerks and the dispatch agents. The department of the Treasury 
has at Washington about 3,000 subordinates ; to which, the one 
hundred and eight Collectors, the Surveyors, the Naval officers, the 
officers of the Mints, and all their subordinates, the vast Internal 
Revenue service collecting nearly one-half the national income, 
the Light house, the Life saving, the Hospital, the Revenue Marine 
services, and many more isolated officials must be added. In the De¬ 
partment of the Interior, there are the Pension and Patent Office ser¬ 
vice, the Land office, the Indian service, the Bureaus of Education 
and Agriculture, and various other officers. The War and Navy De¬ 
partments have civil subordinates of many grades widely separated. 
More than 42,000 postmasters with their subordinates, upwards of 
1,100 serving at the New York City office alone, and the many 
others with the most varied duties, of which the railroad and 
steamboat mail service, and the vast mail contract system are 
examples, are under the Postmaster General. The Department of 
Justice, with its District Attorneys, Marshals and election super¬ 
visors and their subordinates; the National Board of Health, the 
officers of the District of Columbia and of the Territories are also 
to be added, before we get a general view of the vast number and 




22 


variety of the officials under the Executive. Every year they are 
becoming more numerous, their duties more complicated, and the 
need of fixed rules, which shall exclude favoritism and pressure, 
more imperative. 

The authority to appoint these officers, subject to confirmation 
by the Senate, is given by the Constitution to the President, with 
the power, as we have seen, in Congress to vest the appointment 
of inferior officers in heads of departments. Beyond declaring 
that all civil officers shall be removed on impeachment and con¬ 
viction of treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors, 
the Constitution leaves the stupendous power of removal to mere 
implication. It has, however, been authoritively decided and the 
constant practice has been (save as qualified of late by the Tenure 
of Office Acts), that the power of removal belongs to the President, 
as an incident to the power of appointment. The Constitution 
provides no terniy and, otherwise than by implication, no tenure for 
any one of these inferior officers. And prior to a law of 1820, to 
which further reference will be made, no term or tenure was pro¬ 
vided by law for any of these inferior officers. The tenure of 
usage had been that of efficiency and good behavior. The few 
scores of officers and the small amount of revenue—only ;^2,ooo,ooo 
in the first year under the Constitution, as against more than 
;^36o,ooo,ooo last year—apparently gave no great importance to 
such matters at the beginning. Even at the end of Jefferson’s 
first term, the whole revenue of the Government was hardly greater 
than the increase of last year over the previous year, both from 
customs and internal revenue, each of the three amounts being 
about ;^i2,000,000. Yet in the co-existence of a power of removal 
without legal restrictions and a tenure of office undefined by law, 
there was the promise and potency of all the mischief and peril of 
our day. 

And such was felt to be the fact by our early statesmen; for, in 
1789, in the first Congress, the right of removal and the tenure 
of these officials, as matters of the highest importance, were thor¬ 
oughly discussed. Mr. Madison lard down these principles_gen¬ 

erally accepted by his contemporaries and uniformly enforced in 


23 


the national admistration, until the triumph of the spoils system bar¬ 
barism under Jackson and Van Buren, or, at least, until the four 
years’ term statute of 1820—: (i) That the power and the duty 
of making removals were equally vested in the President alone, 
with an authority on the part of the House of Representatives 
: to impeach him if he should either allow an unworthy officer 
to continue in his place, or wantonly remove a meritorious officer; 

I Madison distinctly declaring such a removal to be an act of “ mal¬ 
administration ; ” (2) Fidelity and efficiency were the measure 
of tenure, as character and capacity were the tests for appoint¬ 
ments. There was no fixed term, and apparently no need of any. 
Washington made only nine removals, and all for cause; John 
Adams, only nine, and none, it would seem, by reason of polit- 
I ical opinion ; Jefferson, only thirty-nine, and none of them, 
as he declared, for political reasons ; Madison only five ; Monroe 
I only nine ; J. Q. Adams only two, and all for cause. Defalcations 
were not wholly unknown, and there was inefficiency in some 
' offices. But, compared with what speedily followed the adminis- * 
tration of the forty years covered by these Presidents, it was purity 
and efficiency itself. In no country of the world, in those years, 
were public servants so respectable or administration so untainted. 
No other government had then reached so high a plane of disin¬ 
terestedness, or exhibited so much regard for character and justice 
in dealing with those who served it. 

It was left for the politicians of later days to discover and to 
teach that to select public servants for their merits and to retain 
them because they continued meritorious, are “ un-American.” 
Let us glance at the cause and progress of this great change as 
bearing upon terms and tenure of office. Some facts have been 
stated which illustrate the early pre-eminence of New York for 
the despotism and corruption of her politics. Burr had early laid 
the foundations of her spoils system and, with the aid of Van 
Buren, his most apt and distinguished disciple, that system had 
been made potential in New York, several years previous to 1820. 
It required short terms, and partisan tests for office. It made 
political opinions a ground of appointments and removals and 




24 


required servile obedience to chieftains on the part of all officials. 
Before 1820, Governor Clinton complained, in a message, of an 
organized and disciplined corps of federal officials interfering in 
State elections.” Tammany Hall was becoming a political power. 
Van Buren was pressing at Washington for partisan appointments. 
New York politics had become so notoriously desperate and un¬ 
scrupulous, at that period, as to attract almost as much attention 
as they do at this day. Jackson contriving how to reach the Presi¬ 
dential chair, and affecting the character of a non-partisan, said to 
a New Yorker : I am no politician, but if I were a politician, I 
would be a New York politician.” Van Buren soon made him one. 

The spoils system spirit, thus early reduced to practice in New 
York, was being slowly developed in other parts of the Union. 
Those elements of intrigue and corruption which, little more than 
a decade later, asserted a dominant power for that system, were not 
an instant creation, but a slow and largely a secret growth. That 
growth was facilitated by the utter neglect of all study and teach¬ 
ing of the science of administration. The future champions of 
the system had already reached manhood. Within eleven years 
several of them were to be in the Senate. The creed of the spoils¬ 
men had not been avowed, but the men who were first to proclaim 
it were leading politicians before 1820. 

In that year, William H. Crawford, Secretary of the Treasury, 
was a Presidential candidate, and Van Buren, who was to come into 
the Senate in 1821, even then an aspirant for the Presidency, was 
Crawford’s supporter. They were unsurpassed for theiV skilful use 
of patronage. Both were able to see that if the terms of the in¬ 
ferior officers were reduced to four years, there would be more pat¬ 
ronage to dispose of and an easier introduction of the New York 
system. 

On the 20th of April, 1820, about thirty days before Congress 
adjourned, there was reported a bill (which Mr. Crawford and Mr. 
Van Buren approved) which reduced the constitutional tenure of 
district-attorneys, collectors, naval officers, navy agents, survey¬ 
ors of customs, paymasters, and of several other less important 
officers, to a term of four years. This was the first fixed term for 


25 


any such office. It further declared that the holding of all such offi¬ 
cers, whose commissions were dated September 30th, 1814, should 
expire on the day and month of their date next after September 
30th, 1820. The expiration of other holdings was fixed for a year 
later. The bill was thus retro-active, and it made these terms expire 
on the eve of the Presidential election. There was to be a Presi¬ 
dential election in 1824, when Crawford and Jackson were to be 
leading candidates. How largely and promptly this change would 
add to the patronage of the Treasury, where Mr. Crawford presid¬ 
ed, need not be pointed out. 

But these were hardly the most ominous provisions of the bill; 
for, taking the side of the partisan spoilsmen, against the approved 
doctrines of Madison and the practice of every President, it de¬ 
clared that those officers “ shall be removable at pleasure.” Here 
was rotation legalized for the sake of rotation. Here was the first 
demand of surrender ever made upon the General Government 
in the spirit of the New York spoils system. Here was practi¬ 
cally a revolution in the term and tenure of office; an emphatic 
degradation of the standard according to which the fate of every 
one of these officers was to be determined. In silence, almost 
stealthily, this act—working a revolution in our official system— 
was carried through both Houses; a proceeding perhaps impossi¬ 
ble but for the fact that, for the first time since Washington’s first 
term, there was no effective division into parties, but only into 
factions. 

The avowed reason, or rather the apology for the new policy, 
was to the effect that it would furnish the means of removing un¬ 
worthy officials; the speciousness of which appears in the fact that 
the terms of all in office—worthy and unworthy alike—were, with¬ 
out inquiry, severed absolutely. Nothing but official pleasure was 
to protect the most meritorious in the future. 

The significant facts were that there was no showing of delin¬ 
quencies ; no charges that the President could not or would not remove 
unworthy officials ; not a word of debate; not a record of votes on 
this revolutionary and disastrous bill I But there were statesmen 
who foresaw the disastrous consequences. When Mr. Calhoun, 



26 


who was Secretary of War, heard of the sudden passage of the bill 
—it would seem that he did not know of its pendency until it had 
passed both Houses—he declared it “ one of the most dangerous 
ever passed, and that it would work a revolution.” 

The dangerous consequences of the new policy began very soon 
to appear. Five years after the passage of the Act of 1820, an 
able committee of the Senate, with Mr. Macon at the head—who 
never aided a relative or henchman to an office—made an earnest 
report for the repeal of the Act. But the spoils system had 
secretly made progress. The practical effect of the new law was 
not largely understood by the people, and the movement failed. 
Mr. Crawford having become infirm, Mr. VanBuren transferred his 
support to Jackson, and that system, which this Act would greatly 
strengthen, was made ready to be set up at Washington. Mr. 
Benton says the law of 1820 “had become the means of getting 
rid of faithful officers, and the expiration of the four years’ term 
came to be considered as the vacation of all officers on whom it 
fell.” Vain, indeed, was it to attempt to repeal a law which had 
already become a bulwark of the new system in the spirit of which 
Jackson, the military hero of the day, and VanBuren, the chief¬ 
tain of New York, and the greatest party manipulator of his time, 
were working together for the Presidency. 

The people did not yet comprehend the strength or the ultimate 
purpose of thatlaw, nor had its friends ventured to avow its political 
motive. Jackson had been writing letters to President Monroe— 
and to Kremer as late as 1824, only five years before he was elected 
President—deprecating party tests for office. But the Act em¬ 
boldened the spirit which gave it birth. Van Buren was showing 
what use could be made of it by party leaders. Jackson’s partisan 
removals of twenty times more officials than all who had been re¬ 
moved for any cause since the foundation of the Government, 
clearly interpreted that spirit. Thirsting for more vacancies to fill, 
he recommended in his first message “ a general extension of the 
law which limits appointments to four years ; ” a short term policy 
so radical and dangerous that even his followers shrank from it; 
yet by some strange perversion it is now finding support on the part 


27 


of a few well-meaning persons who urge it in the name of Civil Service 
Reform ! That message further declared “ rotation a leading prin¬ 
ciple in the Republican creed.” Ignoring the true rule that every 
man’s claim upon office is in proportion to his fitness to fill it, 
the same message proclaimed the communistic doctrine that every 
man had an equal right to office ; which, by his appointments, was 
interpreted to mean, in practice, that no man but a partisan, servile 
to himself, had any such right which a president was bound to re¬ 
spect. Three years later, in 1832, Senator Marcy, in the.Senate of 
the United States, explained the new four-years-term spoils system 
—thus supplied by his State to the Union—in these memorable 
words: “When they, (New York politicians) are contending for 
victory, they avow the intention of enjoying the fruits of it. If 
they are defeated they expect to retire from office. If they are 
successful, they claim, as matter of right, the advantages of suc¬ 
cess. They see nothing wrong in the rule that to the victor belongs 
the spoils of the enemy!' The new system was therefore simply 
this: no tenure for more than four years; office and salaries the 
spoils of party warfare; removals at pleasure; rotation in 
order to give offices to as many servile partisans as possible ; ap¬ 
pointments and removals for political reasons; the duty of the 
official to be an obedient worker for his party and a servile vassal of 
its managers. Political assessments were of later growth- Such 
were the origin and spirit of the spoils system as it stands con¬ 
nected with the term and tenure of office. 




28 


n. 

The close of our first article presented the four years’ term 
theory in practice as a part of the “ spoils system,” being en¬ 
forced by Jackson and Van Buren in 1835. 

The disastrous consequences were rapidly disclosed, especially 
in New York, where the system was earliest and most completely 
put in practice. First Swartwout’s and then Hoyt’s enormous de¬ 
falcations as collectors at the New York custom-house; Price’s 
defalcation, there, as District-Attorney; disgraceful abuses in the 
New York post-office; wholesale removals, intrigue, corruption, 
bribery and inefficiency on the part of subordinates at that city 
and elsewhere, more reckless than had ever been before known, 
and in amount far greater under Jackson’s Administration 
alone than under all the others before him. Such is the emphatic 
evidence. The four years’ term law of 1820, for which the only 
apology was the pretended need of bringing inferior officers to a 
more frequent and strict account before the people, was followed 
by two hundred and ninety-seven defaidting collectors, receivers, etc., 
reported by the Secretary of the Treasury to the House 07 i March 
joth, 18j8, —a number greater, it is believed, than all such defaults 
since the Government was established ! But it had not required 
that demonstration to alarm the thoughtful minds of the country. 

As a consequence, the attempt made in the Senate in 1825 to 
repeal the provisions of the law of 1820 was renewed in that body 
in 1835. Despite the weight of Jackson’s Administration against 
it, the repealing act passed the Senate in 1835 by a vote of thirty- 
one to sixteen, every distinguished name in the Senate—Benton, 
Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Ewing, Southard and White,—among 
them, except Buchanan of Pennsylvania and Wright of New York,. 
—those States then, as now, beir^g pre-eminently the “ machine,” 
spoils system ” States,—who voted against it. The Senate had 
not at that time come very much under the vicious influence of 
patronage or the feudal code called “ the courtesy,” which have in 
later years been so disastrously potential in that body. There had 
been no postmasters to confirm before 183,6, and few other officers, j 



29 


The Senate had not, by a tenure of office act, substantially usurped 
the executive power of removal. 

A few extracts from the great debate of 1835 upon the repeal¬ 
ing bill deserve a place here. The spirit which secretly dictated the 
Act of 1820 spoke out plainly against its repeal. Shepley of 
Maine made this avowal: “ I will say plainly that I hold to rota¬ 
tion in office. I would not necessarily require any positive 
fault in an officeholder in order to remove him from office. 
. . . . When officers hold under this Government during 

good behavior, then one of its great features of holding out 
equal privileges to all will have been destroyed.” Here are parti¬ 
san proscriptions and removals without cause as shamelessly 
defended as they were ever avowed by Marcy or practiced by Bar¬ 
nard or Tweed. 

Hill of New Hampshire, a servile lieutenant of Jackson, de¬ 
clared that a “ salutary system of rotation in office should be adopted 
throughout.” Wright of New York, like Marcy, true to the spoils 
system ” of his State, declared that the law of 1820 was calculated 
to secure the cardinal republican principle of rotation in office, 
. . . so that those who had a reasonable share of office ‘might 

give place to others.’ ” What more could a Republican chieftain 
of the present day, or a Tammany Hall “ boss,” desire ? Perhaps 
he was not in favor of a four years’ tenure for United States Sen¬ 
ators and Judges, plainly as his doctrine required it; but, only 
eleven years later, that theory put in practice, as we have seen, 
reduced the good behavior tenure of New York Judges to eight 
years, and made Barnard, Cardoza, McCunn, with judicial scandals 
without number, possible. Mr.' Webster declared that the evil 
effects of the Act of 1820 had vastly predominated; that “a very 
great change has taken place within a few years in the practice of 
the executive government. I am for staying the further contagion 
of this plague. Men in office have begun to think themselves 
mere agents and servants of the appointing power.” 

Mr. White, a supporter of Jackson’s Administration, wished it 
should have the credit of the repeal of that act. He prophetically 
declared that “ under the present state of things society will be- 



30 


come demoralized, . . . the business of office-seeking will be¬ 
come a science, . . . ofhce-hunters will come on with one 

pocket full of bad characters, with which to turn out incumbents, 
and the other full of good characters, with which to provide for 
constituents." Mr. Clay said “ the tendency had been to revive 
the Dark Ages of feudalism and to render office a feudatory." 

Mr. Calhoun declared that officers and people are being taught 
“ that the most certain road to honor and fortune is servility and 
flattery.I have marked its progress in a thousand in¬ 
stances within the last few years . What a few years 

since would have shocked and aroused the v}hole coinmunity, is now 
scarcely perceived or felt; .... and .... when it is 
openly avowed that the public offices are the spoils of the victors, 
it scarcely produces a sensation." Mr. Southard declared that the 
execution of the law of 1820 “had tended to make officeholders 
servile suppliants, destitute of independence of character and of 
manly feeling." 

The partisan power which the four years’ term system had thus 
suddenly and vastly increased, aided by the prestige of Jackson’s 
Administration and the forces marshalled for Van Buren’s election 
to the Presidency the next year, sufficed to prevent the repealing 
act passing the House. The narrow partisans of the Senate carried 
the day against its great statesmen. The victory of the spoilsmen 
increased the pressure and strength in favor of extending short 
terms, which the partisan leaders demanded. 

They next laid siege to the Post-Office Department. The 
postal administration, which, when Washington became President, 
required only seventy-five postmasters, at the opening of Jackson’s 
first term required about eight thousand. Practically, the tenure 
of postmasters had been during good behavior and efficiency, and 
there was no term fixed by law. The management of the postal 
service had been upon business principles, the Postmaster-General 
appointing and removing postmasters. There was no good reason 
for a radical change in that regard. 

Upon such principles, Mr. McLean, as Postmaster-General un¬ 
der John Quincy Adams, had, with great satisfaction to the people, 



31 

managed our postal affairs. He was not willing to enforce the 
new “ spoils system ” in his office; and for that reason Jackson 
hastened to remove him to the Supreme Court bench, and to put a 
more compliant and most inefficient officer in his place. 

It was very natural that the attempt should be made to extend 
the victorious four years’ term theory to the Post-Office. Every 
partisan manipulator wishing more offices to give as bribes, 
every influential politician desiring to be a postmaster, and every 
Congressman seeking patronage, had an interest in favoring it. It 
would strengthen the theory in the Senate if a bill for enforcing it 
should contain provisions for increasing the patronage of Senators 
by requiring postmasters to be confirmed by that body. Accord¬ 
ingly, in 1836,—the year of Van Buren’s election as President,— 
a bill was passed requiring that all postmasters whose compensa¬ 
tion was one thousand dollars a year or upwards should be ap¬ 
pointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, and that their 
term of office should be but four years. They were made remov¬ 
able “ at the pleasure of the President.” 

It is not easy to decide who was most pleased with such a’ law 
—the partisan managers, whose 4>oils it greatly increased, the 
Senators, whose patronage it more than doubled, or President 
Jackson, to whose despotism it added many vassals. But what 
each gained was the common loss of the people; nor was there 
hardly a pretence that any public interest—unless a perpetual rota¬ 
tion of postmasters and a more universal proscription are in the 
public interest,—would be served by this postal service revolution. 

Postmasters whose income was less than ofte thousand dollars 
were left to be appointed and removed.by the Postmaster-General, 
and their original Constitutional tenure was left unchanged, no 
four years’ or other term applying to it. 

Thus were a great number of purely business offices deliberately 
brought within the range of political forces—subjected to Sena¬ 
torial confirmation, given a term which both suggested and facili¬ 
tated their being made incentives and rewards of selfish activity, 
and a part of the spoils of partisan victory in every Presidential 
election. Nor was this all. New grounds of difference between 




32 


the Senate and the President were thus created, and great strength 
was added to the growing power of patronage in that body, which 
in later years has enabled it to usurp and exercise a controlling 
and dangerous influence over the appointment and removal of all 
the principal officers of the Government. Here was the beginning 
of a great and lamentable change in the character and influence of 
this body. 

No further legislation beyond these two Acts of 1820 and 1836 
was necessary to make complete and disastrous a great revolution 
in the politics and official life of the country. But various other 
administrative officers have since been given a term of four years; 
and it is worthy of notice that Congress, disregarding the great 
distinction between legislative and ministerial functions, has never 
given an officer a longer fixed term than foiir years. It looks 
almost as if it had been a settled purpose to force the occupant of 
every official place, by a fear of losing his office, to become a ser¬ 
vile henchman and an intense partisan worker in every Presidential 1 
contest. 

Greatly as the country was alarmed by the manifest degrada¬ 
tion of political life which the" new system was causing, the great 
contest concerning slavery—becoming absorbing at this time,—was 
fatal to any considerable effort for reform from 1835 to 1867, 
when Mr. Jencks brought the subject before Congress, prudently 
directing attention mainly to methods for entering the public 
service, rather than to term or tenure. It soon appeared that the 
first condition of reform was fuller information among the people 
in regard to administrative affairs. 

For more than thirty years, the methods of administration, the 
debates and the political literature of the country had been mis¬ 
leading the people in the spirit of the “ spoils system,” and hard¬ 
ening them into acquiescing familiarity with its abuses. The new 
theory of short terms for the inferior executive officers had come 
by many to be regarded as an essential part of our original insti¬ 
tutions. The new tenure of official favor and partisan servility had 
been accepted by not a few as peculiarly and essentially republican. 
The evils they had caused or greatly aggravated were generally 



33 


regarded as the inevitable drawbacks against the blessings of qur 
liberal institutions. A generation had grown up which accepted 
the doctrine of rotation in the executive offices as a rule of justice, 
if not an evidence of liberty. A great portion of the patriotic and 
honest voters of the country had been induced to think that parties 
could not prosper (if, indeed, they could live,) without a quadren¬ 
nial opportunity of using the public offices as rewards and bribes, 
and the right, at all times, of forcing those who fill them to do the 
partisan work of politics. They were consenting that the Govern¬ 
ment should be plundered as an enemy by each party that captured 
it, to enable that party to be strong and beneficent for the benefit 
of the people. 

These short terms rest on the false and pernicious theory that 
the most salutary admonition for good official conduct in an execu¬ 
tive subordinate is not a sense of direct responsibility to his su¬ 
perior, and a right and duty on the part of that superior to remove 
for good cause, but the certainty of going out at once when his 
political opponents succeed, and of going out very soon, however 
faithfully he may serve the people, in order to make a place for the 
next rotationist in the order of political favor. Every time that 
an efficient and faithful officer left his place at the end of his term, 
or was sent away for political reasons, a sort of proclamation was 
made to the people that the well-doing of the public work was not 
what the Government most sought, but effective party workers and 
compliant tools of party managers. 

We have only to contrast such theories—which tens of thous¬ 
ands of patriotic, candid voters were persuaded to accept, and 
which even yet threaten the cause of true reform,—with the sound 
conclusions of our greatest statesmen, in order to get a vivid sense 
of the demoralizing consequences of familiarity with false methods 
in politics. 

“ Let it once be fully understood that continuance in office de¬ 
pends solely upon the faithful and efficient discharge of duties, and 
that no man will be removed to make place for another, and the 
reform will be half accomplished,”* are words of the late President 
* President Garfield’s speech, Athens, Ohio, 1879. This language, as well as 




34 


which condemn the whole theory of these short-term statutes. 
No other facts can so plainly illustrate the degradation of our 
standard for official life since Jackson’s election, as the single fact 
that candid men should doubt whether character, rather than influ¬ 
ence, should gain a ministerial office, or whether faithful and 
efficient service, rather than partisan work, should measure its 
tenure. 

It should be noticed that those four years’ term provisions did 
not extend to the clerks and other inferior officers in the great de¬ 
partments at Washington, or to the subordinates of postmas¬ 
ters, of collectors, or of naval and other officers named in the 
statutes. Nor did these quadrennial terms—applying only tO' 
postmasters whose compensation was one thousand dollars a year 
or more, and who alone were made confirmable by the Senate,— 
embrace more than about four hundred out of the eight thousand 
postmasters, or one-twentieth of the whole number. Nor have these 
humble postmasters, or any of those subordinates, or any of the 
subordinates of the internal revenue service, yet been subjected to a 
four years’ term. Even Jacksonian politicians dared not make 
those terms more comprehensive; only some politicians of our day 
propose that. 

The collectors nominate and the Secretary of the Treasury ap¬ 
proves the selection of these customs service subordinates. The 
Secretary removes them. The postmasters, within the limits of the 

that which we shall subsequently quote, shows how unwarranted are the inferences- 
which some persons attempt to deduce from the late President’s inaugural address, to- 
the effect that he favored the fixing of short terms of office. He there says nothing 
about fixing any term, but speaks only of “ the tenure ” and “ the grounds upon which 
removals shall be made during terms,” (which, as we have seen already, exist as to 
many offices,) and nothing can be plainer than that he held that removals should be 
for cause, and that the right of removal should be in the Executive, and not in 
the Members of Congress. In the inaugural, he declares, in substance, that he wishes 
a more stable tenure “ for the protection of those intrusted with the appointing power,” 
and of “ incumbents against intrigue and wrong,” etc., through “ pressure.” What 
pressure he meant, he had defined in a speech in Congress in 1870, when he said: 
“ We press for appointments; ... we crowd the doors; Senators and Represent¬ 
atives fill the corridors and throng the offices, until the business is obstructed and un¬ 
worthy besiegers get places.” And see the quotations on subsequent pages on this- 
point, which are decisive as to his view being as here stated. 




35 


appropriations, both select and remove—or, in the language of the 
law, employ and dismiss,—their own subordinates without any 
overruling authority being provided by law. 

But the moment the heads of these offices and the prominent 
postmasters were given the same four years’ terms as the Post¬ 
master-General and the Secretaries presiding over departments, (as 
to whom such terms rest, as we have seen, on very different and 
adequate reasons,) and the rotation “ spoils system ” was well es¬ 
tablished, the tenure and term of the subordinates and the small 
postmasters inevitably became as precarious if not as short as those 
of their superiors. If a four years’ term and a tenure conditioned 
on both the servility of the officer and supremacy in his party were 
best for the collector and the postmaster, why were they not best 
for their clerks ? If best for the postmaster whose compensation 
was one thousand dollars, why not best for him whose compensa¬ 
tion was one hundred dollars, or only ten dollars ? All over the 
country, from the post-office doorkeeper and the custom-house 
scrubbing-woman, to the Postmaster-General and the Secretary of 
the Treasury, that term and tenure, by the force of such logic and 
the pressure of party leaders for spoils, tended to become potential 
and universal. 

When a statute of Congress could be cited to prove the wisdom 
of removing a great postmaster to serve the ends of party in States 
and cities, how could a Postmaster-General resist the demands of 
the town and village politicians that the little postmasters should 
be selected and dismissed to serve the ends of little factions and 
cliques ? And how could postmasters refuse to employ and dis¬ 
miss their clerks upon a theory any less regardless of the public 
interests ? It was the inevitable result of such a system, that a 
servile partisan spirit, an intense, selfish political activity,—forever 
meddling with the freedom of elections, forever bartering places 
for votes,—and a consequent demoralizing neglect of the public 
business, were everywhere developed in the postal not less than in 
the customs service. 

How fatal these frequent removals were to experience, to salu¬ 
tary ambition, and to all the conditions which would attract the 




36 


most worthy to the public service, could be shown by the most 
varied and overwhelming evidence. I have space for illustrations 
from only a single office—that of the custom-house at New York. 

A Democratic collector, in three years, between 1858 and 1861, 
removed three hundred and eighty-nine of the six hundred and ninety 
of his subordinates there; and a Republican collector, in three fol¬ 
lowing years, removed five hundred and twenty-five out of seven 
hundred and two of these subordinates. At a later period, when 
the Democrats had lost power at Washington, the proscription was, if 
possible, even more shameless and disastrous on the part of Republi¬ 
can collectors in the interest of rival factions among themselves. 
Collector Smythe, for example, in three years, removed eight hundred 
and thirty out of nine hundred and three, and Collector Grin- 
nell, in sixteen months, five hundred and ten out of eight hundred 
and ninety-two, being an official execution every day of his term, 
with thirty extras left for Sundays. The aggregate result was that, 
in the fifteen hundred and sixty-five secular days preceding the ap¬ 
pointment of Mr. Arthur as Collector in i8yi, there were sixteen 
hundred and seventy-eight removals m the New York custom-house, 
or more than at the rate of onefor every such day, for five years con¬ 
tinuously ! Every removal, as a rule, involved a long, demoralizing 
struggle to retain the place, and servility and all the resources of 
partisan and personal influence and intrigue in behalf of those seek¬ 
ing to gain it. Who can estimate, or even imagine, the elements 
of feverish and pernicious activity which the hopes and fears of 
such changes among more than twelve hundred officials in a 
single office in a great city contributed to all the lower circles of 
its partisan politics ? The feeling that any day might be his last 
in the public service, and that no merit would ensure retention or 
promotion, tended equally to repel the most worthy citizens from 
the public service, and to degrade the manhood, distract the 
thoughts and destroy the efficiency of those who entered it. Why 
should a man of any capacity or self-respect trust himself to the 
chances of an employment the conditions of which might at any 
moment condemn him to be the next victim of these daily execu¬ 
tions, and in which, if he continued, he would be forced, at the bid- 


37 


ding of party leaders, to do the dirtiest work of factions and to sup¬ 
ply their chieftains, from his salary, with the money they might 
demand for their battles and their elections ? It is not part of my 
purpose to show how lamentably the public service and the Gov¬ 
ernment itself were degraded in public estimation; how much more 
expensive our customs administration has been than that of other 
countries ; what numbers of partisan favorites were needlessly put 
upon the pay-rolls; how arbitrary assessments led to peculations 
and neglect which they were claimed to justify; or how many mil¬ 
lions were lost by the smuggling, bribery, inexperience and incom¬ 
petency attending the collection, through an ever-changing succes¬ 
sion of inexperienced partisan officials, of more than four hundred and 
eighty thousand dollars of revenues each day at that single office,— 
which are indirectly traceable to the low capacity, low character 
and low standard of duty of which such terms and tenures— 
prevailing alike in the Federal and municipal services at New York,. 
—were in great measure the cause. It is a disgraceful, admonishing 
history, with which the civilized world is but too familiar. 

These causes were, without doubt, far more disastrous in that 
office and the New York post-office than elsewhere; but they were 
rapidly extending in all the large cities; and in almost every Fed¬ 
eral office of the country they were in some degree injurious. Re¬ 
ferring to such causes, the late President Garfield declared in Con¬ 
gress that under a judicious civil service the Government could be 
carried on at about one-half its usual cost; and in his last annual 
message, referring to the same system in city affairs. Governor 
Cornell of New York declared that one-third of the officials of 
New York could be “ mustered out ” with advantage to the public. 

The same term and tenure which repel persons of capacity and 
self-respect, attract the incompetent and the shiftless, thus tending 
to make the public offices the asylums of partisan henchmen, per¬ 
sonal dependents and bankrupt imbeciles. Let me not be thought 
to use too strong language. In an article in the Atlantic Monthly 
for July, 1877, the late President Garfield said of such a system: 
‘‘ It degrades the civil service itself; it repels from the ser¬ 

vice those high and manly qualities which are so necessary to a firm 




38 


and effi'cient administration; it debauches the public mind by hold¬ 
ing up public office as the mere reward of party zeal.” 

The illustration of the New York custom-house should be car¬ 
ried yet farther. It was not long after Mr. Arthur became Collec¬ 
tor in 1871, before he was convinced that a more stable tenure was 
absolutely essential to the improvement of the customs administra¬ 
tion. Under great difficulties, he firmly acted upon his sense of 
public duty, removing only one hundred and forty-four officials 
in the five years of his holding office, as against the sixteen hundred 
and seventy-eight removals in the previous five years. A less ex¬ 
pensive and a much improved administration were the practical 
results. In a letter to Secretary Sherman, dated 23d November, 
1877, Collector Arthur says: “Permanence in office, which, of 
course, prevents removal except for cause, and promotion based 
upon good conduct and efficiency, are essential elements of correct 
civil service.” The same conviction finds utterance in his letter 
of acceptance as Vice-President, in which he says : “ The tenure 
of office should be stable. Positions of responsibility should, so 
far as practicable, be filled by the promotion of worthy and efficient 
officers.” His views and those of the late President appear to be 
identical on these points. 

Yet more decisive results, both in the economy secured and in 
superior officials brought into the service, have attended the more 
complete enforcement of the civil service rules and competitive ex¬ 
aminations at that office under President Hayes and his successors, 
since July, 1878. From that date, during a period of about two 
years, for which I have the exact figures, only forty-four removals 
were made, and every one of them for cause ; of which one was for as¬ 
saulting a woman, nine were for taking bribes or passing uninspected 
baggage, five for intoxication, six for abandoning charge or place 
of duty, six for incompetency, two by reason of disabling sickness, 
six for absence without leave, two for insubordination, and the rest 
for analogous causes. I give these causes for removal that the 
reader may appreciate how essential the right and duty of removals 
in the head of a department are to discipline and efficiency, how 
absurd it is to adopt short terms as a substitute for removals, and 




39 


how impracticable it would be to bring up the discussion of such njat- 
ters upon confirmations before the Senate. What could the Senate 
do with charges of such offences before it ? Let the reader ask 
himself what would have been the effect, had there been a four 
years’ term, with no such right of removal in the meantime in the 
case of such offenders? It should be added that since competitive 
■examinations have been enforced there has been a waning pressure 
for unjustifiable removals, as no man could get into a vacancy un¬ 
less by winning in open competition, and the most vigorous pushers 
are not usually the most formidable competers where real capacity 
is the test. The influence which resists a needful removal in the 
case of a culprit who was pushed in as the favorite of a party or as a 
vassal of a chieftain, is unknown in cases where the official without 
backers gets his place only by reason of his superior capacity as 
shown in the examinations. 

The first results of the “merit system” thus disclosed have 
been substantially repeated at the New York custom-house, where 
competitive examinations, aided by a more stable tenure, have filled 
the service since the date last referred to, and have substantially 
brought to an end the series of scandals which for nearly two gen¬ 
erations had disgraced that office. 

Other effects injurious to the administration and politics of the 
country, either caused or greatly aggravated by these four years’ 
term statutes, have become too serious to be passed without notice. 
I refer especially to Congressional patrgnage and the usurpation of 
the executive power by the Senate in connection with confirmations, 
a subject which requires a whole article for its proper treatment. 
When short terms were in theory made a sort of substitute for the 
discharge of the executive duty of removals for cause, and removals 
and appointments were based on political influence, and were held 
justifiable means of party aggrandizement,—when, by the very 
language of an Act of Congress, not the welfare of the public, but 
“ the pleasure of the President,” and (by analogy,) of heads of de¬ 
partments as well, were made the rule of action,—what more 
natural than that Members of Congress should first promise places 
(in aid of their election,) and next demand them of the President 



40 


and Secretaries as a condition of supporting their measures in 
Congress? That many members have stood above this form of 
bribery and coercion, and that the majority have but mildly par¬ 
ticipated in it, we may well believe; yet it has become an alarm¬ 
ing evil, the peril of which no candid man will deny. A great pro¬ 
portion of all the appointments and removals in our public service 
have become a part of the perquisites and spoils of Congressmen, 
which have tended to the degradation of official manhood and to 
corruption and coercion at elections in manifold forms. A single 
appointment which a Congressman could control can be vaguely 
promised to and may influence a score of voters. How votes for 
appropriations have been influenced by the promise of appoint¬ 
ments and removals, could easily be shown. It was an abuse which 
for more than a century disgraced the British civil service as much 
as it has disgraced our own; but there the enforcement of com¬ 
petitive examinations for admissions, reinforced by a tenure of 
merit, within the last twenty-five years, has almost wholly removed 
the evil. Our situation in this regard is now much what that of 
Great Britain was in 1855, when her vigorous reform began. 

The evil, however, has been far the greatest in our service in 
connection with confirmations by the Senate. In the spirit of the 
Constitution and according to the usage of its framers, the Senate 
was only to consider the personal fitness of the nominee for the 
place. After those short-term laws facilitated a rotation of favorites 
and supreme regard for partisan consideration, confirmations began 
to depend upon State politics and Senatorial favoritism. Senators 
began very generally to be the partisan commanders and the 
patronage-dispensers of their States,—the feudal lords of State 
politics. The great test on confirmation became more and more 
the bearing of the proposed appointment upon the local politics in 
the place where the nominee was to serve, or upon the next Sena¬ 
torial election ; and, provided the candidate was fairly respectable, 
his administrative capacity for the vacant place was little regarded. 
In other words, the confirmations very generally disregarded the 
only motives which it was fit for the Senate to consider. As every 
Senator was similarly situated, and eacji could have his own ends 





41 


served only by conceding the same autocracy to his fellow-Senators 
which he desired for himself, there was a common interest and 
opportunity for self-aggrandizement by usurping the executive 
powers of appointment and removal. The short-term, tenure-at- 
pleasure statutes of 1820 and 1836, by bringing many more officers 
into the Senate to be confirmed,—as many as four hundred post¬ 
masters when the last act went in effect,—equally contributed to 
strengthen the partisan spirit which gave them birth and to facili¬ 
tate the Senatorial usurpation of which they are the bulwark. 
Reinforced by these statutes. Senators were enabled to say to each 
other (at least, by their conduct): “You control the appointments 
for your State, and I will control those for mine. Let us have a 
law of division and good manners,—to be called ‘ the courtesy of 
the Senate,’—for the enjoyment of this patronage, according to 
which Senators from each State shall take to themselves as perquis¬ 
ites the naming of all officials to serve therein, and also a fit share 
of those to be confirmed for service at Washington, it being further 
understood that each Senator’s approval of his man shall be held 
to supersede the duty on the part of the other Senators to investi¬ 
gate the merits of that favorite.” Such, in spirit, is the courtesy of 
the Senate. The rule, of course, is not executed universally or 
with exactness. Many Senators condemn it in theory as a selfish 
monopoly and a revolutionary usurpation ; yet it generally pre¬ 
vails. It requires real courage and patriotism to stand up against 
such a courtesy. To do it, the Senator must surrender power dear 
to his pride and ambition, must offend fellow-Senators by rebuking 
a usage they enforce, and must curtail his own ability to give 
places which his followers demand at his hands. That this courtesy 
is utterly repugnant to the spirit of the Constitution, to the early 
practice under it, to the duty of the President to see that the laws 
are faithfully executed, and his ability to do so, to the independence 
of the Senators themselves for the fit discharge of their functions, to 
the counterpoise and strength of our institutions, and is in every 
way demoralizing and pernicious, are facts almost too plain to be 
reasoned about. Only an enlightened and indignant public opinion 
can overcome this abuse. It need not be questioned that the infor- 




42 


mation of Senators as to the merits of persons seeking office from 
their States may in a proper way be with advantage brought to the 
attention of the President. There are Senators whose action in that 
regard is unselfish and patriotic. But it is almost impossible that 
partisan interests should not be potential. The pressure put upon 
Senators is almost overwhelming, and their power to resist it is all 
the more feeble because their whole interference with nominations 
and removals is known to be indefensible and without a sense of 
legal responsibility. They force the President from the line of his 
duty by demanding favors in disregard of their own, and yet hold 
him solely responsible for consequences. He pleads this inter¬ 
ference as an excuse. Such facts make this courtesy and usurpa¬ 
tion the most formidable obstacles.in the way of establishing a 
proper tenure of office, and of every other effective method for 
reforming the civil service. 

This Senatorial usurpation at first included only nominations ; 
but it was soon extended to removals. If the President could not 
appoint for a State except with the approval of its Senators, of 
what avail was it to remove, and thus only impair his own ability 
to have the laws faithfully executed ? The Senatorial control of 
confirmations was therefore readily converted into a control of 
removals. 

This necessity forced the President to bargain or supplicate 
with Senators for permission to remove. But Senators demanded 
even more than that. Statutes known as tenure of office acts, passed 
over the veto of the President, were resorted to in order to reduce 
the power of removal to a direct dependence upon the confirmation 
of a successor ; and, under the “ courtesy,” confirmation would, as 
a rule, depend upon the pleasure of the Senators from the State 
where the removal was sought to be made. 

The quarrel with President Johnson afforded a pretext for such 
tenure of office acts, which of course greatly increased the influence 
of the Senate. But the refusal of the Senate to recede from its 
usurpation, or repeal those acts, after all plausible excuse for 
them had ceased, ominously illustrates the profound selfishness and 
ambition in which that usurpation is entrenched. 




43 


As the law how stands, under the Tenure of Office Acts of 186/ 
and 1869, no officer nominated, subject to confirmation by the 
Senate,—of which there are about thirty-five hundred,—can be re¬ 
moved, except with the consent of the Senate. During the recess 
of the Senate, the President may suspend such an officer, and the 
suspension will be effective until the end of the next session, sub¬ 
ject to an agreement between the President and the Senate in the 
meantime. 

The deplorable significance of this condition of affairs cannot 
be mistaken. That great executive power of removal for good cause 
—the public, just, vigorous and uniform exercise of which is essen¬ 
tial to all fidelity, to all economy, to all efficiency, and to every" 
wholesome sense of responsibility, alike on the part of the superior 
officer who wields it and every inferior officer who is subject to it,— 
is apportioned and enfeebled. The greater part of it is handed 
over to a body acting secretly and through political majorities,, 
the members of which neither have nor feel any direct responsi¬ 
bility for the working of the executive branch of the Government, 
The President, constitutionally responsible for the faithful execu¬ 
tion of the laws, can neither appoint nor remove any one of nearly 
thirty-five hundred of the higher officials through whom those laws 
are to be executed, without the consent of the majority—gener- 
erally the political and perhaps the hostile majority,—of the Senate,, 
if, indeed, he can make such removal or appointment without the 
consent of the Senators of the State where an official delinquent 
defies executive authority. Need it be declared that such a sys¬ 
tem humiliates the Executive,—that it weakens his sense of respon¬ 
sibility for good administration in the same degree that it impairs- 
his ability to secure it,—that it emboldens his subordinates to defy 
him and the heads of departments, teaching such subordinates to* 
seek the protection of Senators by becoming their vassals in the 
politics of their States? Need I enlarge upon the tendency of such’ 
a system to cause the wishes of Senators to be potential, and their 
favor to be courted in the great departments, custom-houses and 
post-offices, where their power should only be felt through inde¬ 
pendent criticism or stern investigation, to which their having 



44 


favorites in office is almost sure to be fatal? Need it be pointed 
out that such a system tends to constant collisions or corrupt bar¬ 
gains between the Executive and the Senate ? That system tells 
the people that partisan work and interests are the supreme stan¬ 
dards for ministerial offices. It makes the Senate as much an 
executive as a legislativ^e body, its action tending more and more 
to impair the counterpoise and stability of our institutions. Sena¬ 
tors are more than ever before pressed by politicians of every 
class to make their action upon nominations and removals service¬ 
able to the local interests of parties, factions and chieftains, whereby 
it has become equally unusual and difficult to make that action 
turn upon anything else. The struggles about the Collectorship 
at New York, the course of Mr. Conkling, and the late all-night 
contest about the removal of the postmaster at Lynchburg, Vir¬ 
ginia, are but examples of this tendency. 

The same causes which have powerfully tended to make Sena¬ 
tors the partisan autocrats and patronage-purveyors of their States, 
have drawn upon them a vast demoralizing solicitation for office 
against which Senator Dawes has so strongly protested, to make 
their elections scenes of intense strife and lamentable corruption, 
to absorb the time needed for their public duties, to blind them in 
clouds of adulation, to make them unmindful of the higher 
sentiments of the people, and to cause the Senatorial office itself to 
sink in public estimation. In estimating the patronage and the 
control over State politics and elections gained by Senators through 
their power to appoint and remove collectors and postmasters, it 
must be borne in mind that Senatorial dictation may, and very 
generally does, extend to the selection and removal of the subordi¬ 
nates of those officers, so that Senators, as Mr. Clay in 1835 
prophesied they would, have very generally become a sort of 
feudal chiefs in the political affairs of their States, whose authority 
now dominates alike Federal officials and State elections. 

A few days after President Grant’s first inauguration, when 
every plausible excuse for retaining the Tenure of Office Acts had 
ceased, the House, which has no share in confirmations, declared 
itself for the repeal of those tenure of office acts by a vote of one 



45 


hundred and thirty-eight against sixteen. In the message of Decem¬ 
ber, 1869, President Grant declared “ those laws inconsistent with 
a faithful and efficient administration of the Government.” A few 
days after that message, the House again voted their repeal by a 
majority of more than six to one ; and in 1872, without a division, 
the House a third time voted their repeal. The Senate was per¬ 
sistent for its courtesy and its usurped power, and the majority of 
its members uphold them still, relentlessly exercising the authority 
they confer. In this policy, Mr. Conkling was a leader, and fell 
under its rebuke by his own State. 

In strong and earnest language. President Hayes repeatedly 
urged the need of the President being allowed his legitimate au¬ 
thority, and of Members of Congress confining themselves to their 
proper functions. 

In a speech delivered in Congress in 1872, the late President 
Garfield declared that “ for many years the Presidents had been 
crying out in their agony to be relieved from the unconstitutional 
pressure from the legislative department ; that we have reached a 
point where it is absolutely necessary that Congress sliall abdicate 
its usurped and pretended right to dictate appointments to the 
Chief Executive.” In an article in the Atlantic Monthly for July, 
1877, he further declared that the Tenure of Office Acts “ have vir¬ 
tually resulted in the usurpation by the Senate of a large share of 
the appointing power. The President can remove no officer with¬ 
out the consent of the Senate, and such consent is not often given 
unless the appointment of the successor ... is agreeable to the 
Senator in ivhose State the appointee resides, . . . ivhich has 

resulted in seriously crippling the power of the Executivey and has 
placed in the hands of Senators and Representatives a poiver most 
corrupting and dangerous." He .says that “ one-third the working- 
hours of Senators and Representatives is hardly sufficient to meet 
the demands made upon them in reference to appointments for 
office.” “ It will be a proud day,” he adds, “ when a Senator or 
Representative . . . has it not in his power to secure the re¬ 

moval of the humblest clerk in the civil service of his Govern- 
” Pages might be filled with condemnation by the more in- 




ment. 




46 


•dependent Senators of this usurped power of dictating in executive 
affairs. In the November number of the North American Review 
of last year, Senator Hoar tells us that, when such authority is 
transferred from the Executive to the Senate, it is “ taken from an 
officer responsible and impeachable, and transferred to a numerous 
assembly acting on such questions in secret without individual re¬ 
sponsibility,” and that “ in this way the executive maybe subjected 
to another branch of the Government.” Of this increased Con¬ 
gressional patronage. Senator Dawes has lately declared that it 
subordinates the duties of the legislator to the distribution of fa¬ 
vors, the liquidation of debts, and the making of provision for the 
thriftless ; ” and Senator Pendleton, that “ it draws Senators and 
Representatives into neglect of the chief duty of legislation, and too 
often into making the support of an Administration conditional upon 
obtaining offices for their friends.” 

Such is the situation in large measure caused, and in every 
particular aggravated, by short, fixed terms and a precarious parti¬ 
san tenure. Surely, it is not too much to hope that the day is not 
distant when Senators will concede to the President that Constitu¬ 
tional authority essential to the fit discharge of his functions, and 
will cease to give to usurped interference with the executive duties 
of nominations and removals the time and thought so much needed 
in the sphere of legislation. When we see such momentous subjects 
as the proper count of the Presidential vote, and the conditions upon 
which a Vice-President may take up the work of a disabled President, 
held in ominous suspense,—while contests about a single post¬ 
master are absorbing the Senate and drawing its members into 
angry debate concerning the politics of a State,—it is well to re¬ 
member that the four hundred postmasters which the law of 1836 
first brought into that body for confirmation are now increased to 
eighteen hundred and forty, and are growing more numerous every 
year. The period is not remote when the whole time of the Sen¬ 
ate will not be sufficient for confirming postmasters alone_as they 

are now confirmed. When we consider the small proportion of the 
inferior officers to which four years’ terms have yet been extended, 
we can better estimate the consequences of acting upon Jackson’s 


47 


advice by making such terms universal. The whole number of 
such officials now subject to the four years’ term is, I repeat, only 
about thirty-five hundred, of which about thirty-five are in the 
Treasury Department at Washington, more than one hundred are 
collectors, and eighteen hundred and forty are postmasters, to 
which naval officers, surveyors, and the other officers with the 
most diverse duties, must be added. 

The proposal, therefore, to make that term general is nothing 
less than this: that each one of the more than seventy-five thou¬ 
sand other inferior officers shall either go out at the end of four 
years, or keep in through contests of influence and favoritism. Does 
any candid man believe our institutions could stand such a strain ? 

It is quite true that the example of a four years’ term and a 
tenure by favor on the part of the thirty-five hundred of the most 
prominent of such officers, aided by the laws which proclaim the vir¬ 
tues of quadrennial rotation, have caused a great portion of those in the 
grades below them to be frequently changed. Yet it is a sig¬ 
nificant fact, standing in strong condemnation of a four years' 
term, that, despite such examples, the average periods of service in 
the lower offices—of late, at least ,—have been two or three times 
four years, and have been the longest where administration has 
been best and politics least partisan and corrupt. 

The average time of service of the more than forty thousand 
postmasters whose term is not fixed by law has probably been 
about ten years,—at least, if we exclude post-offices established with¬ 
in that period ; and that of the subordinates in the New York City 
post-office—where Mr. James and his successor have enforced the 
civil service rules and competitive examinations with such admirable 
results,—is unquestionably still longer, there being among them 
one who has served since 1825, about a hundred who have been 
there twenty years, and forty-eight who have been there twenty- 
five years. It is believed that the average period of service of the 
inferior officers of the Treasury Department (and certainly of the 
State Department,) at Washington is yet longer. There is good 
reason for believing that the term of service of collectors, and of 
the postmasters at the larger offices, who are confirmed by the 



48 


Senate for four years, has been considerably shorter than that ot 
their subordinates or of the minor postmasters. There have, for 
example, been three collectors at New York during a period of 
about ten years, in which less than two hundred out of about thir¬ 
teen hundred subordinates in that office have been changed. And 
the removal of the late Collector Merritt in the middle of his term 
of four years without any cause connected with the discharge of 
his duties, stands as a conspicuous warning that a four years’ term 
is, to say the least, not a check upon removals. 

Consider the direct consequence of a four years’ term for the 
subordinates of the Treasury Department. There are serving 
in that department at Washington more than .three thousand 
officials—say, two thousand and fifty males and one thousand 
and sixty females, without any fixed term. A four years’ 
term would require over seven hundred changes there each 
year, or successful contests for a re-appointment,—more than 
at the rate of two every secular day,—changes as frequent as 
the most barbarous partisan proscription has ever accomplished at 
the New York custom-house. Could a Secretary of the Treasury 
do more than arrange with contesting politicians. Congressmen and 
factions for these daily appointments ? 

We have seen that in the seven years during which reforms 
were carried over their first stages by Collector Arthur, and under 
his successors, through competitive examinations, worked a 
revolution at the New York custom-house, there were only one hun¬ 
dred and eighty-eight removals from a force of over twelve hundred 
and fifty subordinates; but a four years’ term would cither have 
taken from the office every person in it, and three-fourths of tht most 
experienced of their successors, or have involved successful 
contests for over two thousand re-appointments m order to retain 
the experienced officials. A new appointment there every day 
would be quite inadequate under such terms. Very likely, there 
are persons in that office who might with advantage be removed; 
but the difficulty is not in removing those who, without backers, 
came in through competitive examinations, but in removing those 
whom great politicians and factions pushed into the service, and 




49 


^ who are at hand to push, bully and punish if the attempt be made 
to remove them. 

If all postmasters were given a term of four years, instead of 
there being, as now, but four hundred and sixty, of the eighteen hun¬ 
dred and forty subject to a four years’ term, who are required to go out 
each year, or to successfully fight the battle of re-appointment, 
there would be over ten thousand and five hundred of such cases 
each year, or about thirty every day, to be dealt with, to which 
I must be added one-fourth of all the subordinates in all the post- 
offices in the United States and all cases of resignation and remov¬ 
al. If it be conceivable that an intelligent people can ever enter 
upon such changes, it is plain that there must be an additional 
Postmaster-General, with no other duty than working a vast ma- 
] chinery of rotation and fighting the politicians. 

Consider the effect of a four years’ term upon the post-office at 
’ New York. It would require between four and five times as many 
! changes each year as have been annually made in the period during 
' which its administration has been so wonderfully improved. Two 
I new selections or re-appointments every three days would not fill the 
places which such a term would vacate. Nearly the whole time of 
a postmaster would be required to attend to them. Besides the 
pressure for re-appointments, there would be various new contest¬ 
ants for the vacancy. Trained experience would, of course, be 
diminished in the ratio that changes would be increased. The 
brevity of the term would repel the most worthy from seeking to 
enter, and would be fatal to that ambition and zeal which are 
inspired by hopes of promotion when tenure is based on merit. It 
has been such a tenure and such hopes, aided by the superior per¬ 
sons secured by competitive examinations, which have enabled Mr. 
James and his successor, Mr. Pearson, to give that great office its 
pre-eminence for efficiency and economy. 

It is enough to suggest that disturbing elements and disastrous 
changes of the same kind would be the consequence of a four years’ 
term in all the departments, at every custom-house, and at each of 
the thousands of post-offices, which would add a vast aggregate to 
the demoralizing forces of our politics. The great ocean of politics, 
would be more stormy than ever before. 





50 


But it should be clearly comprehended that the increased 
changes there we have estimated would not be merely a substitute 
for those which take place at present, or under a tenure of good 
behavior, but an addition to them. The right of removal for 
cause, and the duty of exercising it, are essential alike to the purity, 
to the efficiency and to the discipline of the public service ; and 
they are not less so when terms are short and tenure precarious, 
than when fidelity and efficiency are encouraged by the hope of be¬ 
ing retained if the most worthy. Under whatever term or 
tenure, there must be a right and duty of removal for at least these 
causes: (i) Conviction of an offence involving infamy or corrup¬ 
tion ; (2) dishonest or infamous conduct admitted or made clear; 
(3) mental or physical incapacity for official work; (4) habitual 
inefficiency; (5) wilful neglect of duty; (6) intentional disregard 
of lawful instructions or regulations; (7) intemperance. 

The need of removals for such causes shows that neither a life 
tenure nor a tenure for good behavior can be accepted ; at least, un¬ 
less the meaning of good behavior shall be so extended as to include 
all the other causes above mentioned. The Government must deal 
with its officials upon fair business principles, leaving pensions and 
other benevolent aids to be bestowed upon clearly defined princi¬ 
ples of their own. The same reasons of economy and self-protec¬ 
tion which do not allow its affairs to be entrusted to boys and girls, 
must forbid their being left to the care of dotards or imbeciles. 

It is too plain for argument that the official who has little hope 
of holding his place beyond a short term, or whose tenure may any 
day be severed by the defeat of a party, or the caprice of a great 
politician or Congressman, is held to duty and moved to effort by 
reasons vastly weaker than those which shape the life of him who 
feels that good conduct and efficiency are the security of his place. 
Suppose the terms were reduced to a year or to a month, and that, 
at their end, rotation was made inexorable; will any candid man 
assert that there would be more capacity, honesty and efficiency, or 
a more salutary ambition, in the public service ? or would it fall, 
more than ever before, into the hands of the shiftless, reckless and 
incompetent, who, without hope or aspiration, would make it a mere 





51 


refuge from the necessities of the hour? Nor would such a vaga¬ 
bond service be less in need of removals as a means of enforcing 
discipline and efficiency, for both would diminish in the proportion 
that terms were made short. 

Clearly, then, removals for cause must be not less but more fre¬ 
quent and imperative under short terms of office, and they must be 
in addition to all the changes caused by the expirations of such 
terms. 

Who does not plainly see that each of the forty-four removals 
for cause, in the New York custom-house, for example,—the grounds 
of which we have stated,—would have been quite as necessary, had 
the term been four years, as when no term was fixed ? Let us, then, 
clearly perceive that the proposal to give a four years’ term to the 
nearly eighty thousand executive officials now holding their places 
subject to no term, is not only to make about twenty thousand vacan¬ 
cies each year inevitable, but it is to add that number to all those 
which may arise from resignations and from removals for any legiti¬ 
mate cause. 

But these considerations come far short of suggesting the mul¬ 
tiplied changes and instability which a universal term of four years 
would cause. That term was provided by law in 1820 and 1836, 
as we have seen, for a few of the higher offices, on the theory that 
a longer holding of executive places was a monopoly, and that a 
quadrennial rotation was republican justice. The demand that the 
same term be now extended to the near eighty thousand inferior 
places is mainly in the spirit of the original movement, the ex¬ 
ception being on the part of a few sincere and patriotic citizens 
who imagine that the “ spoils system ” recommendation of Jackson’s 
first message to that effect may be metamorphosed into an agency 
of reform ! 

The fact that those holding under four-year terms have, as we have 
seen, retained their places for much shorter periods than those un¬ 
affected by such terms, seems decisive that short terms tend to in¬ 
stability—in other words, produce the rotation which their cham¬ 
pions favor. The more carefully we consider the subject on grounds 
of reason, the more fear we may well have if short terms are to be 






52 


made universal. Quite aside from the fact that such terms are de¬ 
manded in the name of rotation and of the communistic theory that 
every man has an equal right to office, they make a sort of legis¬ 
lative proclamation of such doctrines. They apply alike to wortliy 
and unworthy officials, and hence tell the people that every officer, 
no matter how pure and useful, should leave his place at the end 
of four years. He is, in the spirit of such law, if he stays longer, 
an odious monopolist, holding by favor what belongs to another. 
A law fixing a four years’ term plainly says that a ministerial officer 
should not hold his place either so long as he remains upright and 
efficient, or so long as his superior officer regards him as more 
useful to the public than an inexperienced man would be, but that, 
for reasons paramount to all such considerations, his service should 
end absolutely with the four years. These reasons—however parti¬ 
san, communistic, or corrupt,—are by the legislative made impera¬ 
tive upon the executive ; they are unavowed by the law, and are 
left to mere inference on the part of the people. They are reasons, 
at once vague and mysterious, which plainly and equally disregard 
personal merit in the inferior officer displaced and the responsi¬ 
bility of his superior for good administration in his own depart¬ 
ment. At best, they are an invasion by ihe leg slative upon the 
executive; for they fully imply that the executive shall not re¬ 
move those unfit for the public service, and cannot be trusted to 
decide how long the services of a subordinate are useful to the 
public—powers which, under the Constitution, plainly belong to the 
executive. Will any well-informed, candid man claim that our 
executive service has been injured by too much stability or experi¬ 
ence on the part of those who fill it ? Can any facts be referred 
to which show that the public work would be done better or with 
less expense if the service of the near eighty thousand officials not 
under a four years’ term had been as short as has been the 
service of the thirty-five hundred who hold under such a term ? 
On the contrary, have not inexperience, incapacity, instability and 
political intrigue and agitation—which are the natural results of 
too frequent changes,—been among the great evils of our official 
life ? 




53 


Such considerations will prevent the provision of short terms 
ever being regarded as legislation in the interest of efficient or 
economical administration. They will be regarded as the enforce¬ 
ment of a pretended system of justice in office-holding,—as an ap¬ 
proval of increased patronage for parties—of diminished power in 
the executive over its own subordinates,—of encroachment on 
the part of Congress beyond the sphere of its responsibility,—of 
more absolute dependence upon mere favor on the part of subordi¬ 
nates. Such theories, taught by law, would powerfully tend to 
increase the frequency of removals without cause, and to make 
more respectable and potential the demands of parties, chieftains 
and great officials for patronage, rotation and spoils. 

Short terms are in principle a sort of invitation, even to the 
Executive himself, to remove for reasons other than the good of 
the pul lie service; for those terms are in substance a removal, 
every four years, of every person in the public service, not for 
avowed cause, but utterly irrespective of the merits of those re¬ 
moved. It is now the plain right and duty of the Executive to re¬ 
move for cause, and not to remove without cause. But the four 
years’ term statute provides for additional removals, irrespective of 
this right and duty and regardless of the judgment of the Execu¬ 
tive. They emphatically teach servility by saying to every subor¬ 
dinate : “Your sole chance of holding beyond the four years de¬ 
pends on Executive favor exerted for your re-appointment. A 
peaceful holding is not to be a consequence of well doing. Look to 
favor and influence. Under the laws of your country, or by reason 
of any merit or usefulness they pretend to respect, you have no 
claim to stay an hour beyond the quadrennial period.” Mr. Web¬ 
ster, in 1835, in urging the repeal of the four years’ term of 1820, 
covered the ground in these words: “ The law itself vacates the 
office and gives the means of rewarding a friend without the exer¬ 
cise of the power of removal at all. Here is increased power with 
diminished responsibility. Here is a still greater dependence on 
Executive favor, and, of course, a new dominion over opinion and 
over conduct.” 

If official merit, in the estimation of the appointing power, is a 




54 


good reason for continuing longer in office, why bring the holding 
to an end by a fixed term ? The end of the term but refers that 
same question to the identical authority which would, except for 
the term, have decided it. If unworthy to decide when to remove 
for cause, is not the superior officer unworthy to decide when to 
re-appoint for merit ? 

But the four years’ term law does not stop there. It not only 
arms every office-seeker with a new argument for demanding for 
himself the place of the experienced official whose place it vacates, 
but it enables that demand to be complied with without the re¬ 
sponsibility of a removal. In other words, it invites rotation, 
justifies it, and makes it easy and irresponsible. From the col¬ 
lector, postmaster and heads of departments,—who have thus far 
been able to retain their subordinates for ten or more years,—the 
extension of that term would take away all means of self-protection, 
and leave them at the mercy of that tremendous pressure of party 
leaders and patronage-mongers which the late President Garfield 
forcibly portrayed. Every reason which could be urged in favor 
of a four years’ term law could also be urged by party managers 
and great officials against re-appointments at the end of those terms. 
For, how is rotation to be secured,—how is each man any more 
certain to get his fair share of office under short terms,—if all 
the good officers who ought not to have been removed are to be 
re-appointed at the end of their terms ? If there are not to be 
more changes under a four years’ term than without it,—if inex¬ 
perience is not to be increased, and skilled servants whom the 
public has educated are not to be driven out,—then what the gain 
of the short-term law upon the theory cl its advocates ? It would 
not cause rotation. 

There are doubtless a few worthy persons who favor a law 
creating a four years’ term, because they think it may be made a 
substitute for removals, and perhaps have a vague idea that it 
will promote justice. But all experience and the very nature of the 
proposed change should admonish them. The arguments of the 
party managers who favor short terms, and of the amiable re¬ 
formers who incline to accept them, are utterly incompatible. 


55 


When a minority of doctors could not admit a blister to be a 
cure for a carbuncle, they agreed to an application of ice on one 
side and of the blister on the other side; but such reformers pro¬ 
pose an absolute assent to more fuel for putting out a fire. 

Every patronage-monger,—every caucus manipulator,—every 
shiftless office-seeker of the land,—every aspiring demagogue 
longing for more offices to pledge for votes,—every unscrupulous 
chieftain seeking more callow officials to tax and more places to 
give as bribes,—every intense partisan believing that spoils are the 
strength of parties, and that rotation in office is a vital principle of 
republics,—is not only in favor of a four years’ term, but will insist 
on true Jacksonian proscription during that term. Can any argu¬ 
ment be necessary to make it clear that every concession to such 
theories but intensifies and embitters the communistic, partisan and 
proscriptive spirit which they embody? Every admission in the 
statutes that some other person than the responsible executive 
officer shall decide how long his subordinate shall be retained, or 
that reasons independent of the merits of the subordinate shall de¬ 
termine that decision, strengthens the arguments of the spoilsmen 
in the same degree that it impairs the discipline and efficiency of 
the service and departs from the principles of the Constitution. 

Tlie language of Mr. Jefferson, in his letter to Mr. Madison 
already quoted, concerning the four years’ term created by the Act 
of 1820, is prophetic. “It saps the constitutional and salutary 
functions of the President and introduces a principle of intrigue 
and corruption which will soon leaven the mass not only of Sen¬ 
ators but of citizens. If will keep in constant excitement all the 
hungry cormorants for office; render them, as well as those in 
place, sycophants to their Senators.” Mr. Conkling and his fol¬ 
lowers thought it had made the people also sycophants to their 
Senators. 

If a ministerial officer should go out at the end of four years, in 
order that a new Administration or party coming into power may 
be able to put in men of their own opinions, why should 
he not go out at any time during his term if he ceases to hold 
the views of the. ruling party? If a four years’ term should be 




56 


provided to afford offices for all those seeking them, should 
they not be made yet shorter, and proscriptive removals during 
the term be added for the same reasons, when, as has lately 
been the fact at Washington, the ante-rooms are crowded with 
office-seekers, and the tables of the secretaries are loaded with 
office-begging letters ? Such reasons are just as good for bringing 
down the term to two years, to one year, or even to two months, 
as we have seen was the fact in the Florentine and other Italian 
republics. We must reject rotation as a principle, or carry it to its 
legitimate results. If the best ability and character for serving the 
people, and the best and most economical administrators, be not 
the standard and the end recognized by law, then we can nowhere 
set them up against the claims of the communistic office-seeker or 
patronage-monger. 

The proportion of Federal officials to the population ranges 
from one in twenty-four in the District of Columbia, to one in five 
hundred and forty in Vermont and one in fifteen hundred in Georgia. 
The average seems to be about one official among every six hun¬ 
dred of the population, or one official for every one hundred and 
fifty males and females with some competency for official duties. 
That, as a rule, from five to fifty persons make a contest or claim 
for nearly every vacancy, is well known. Will this demoralizing 
office-seeking be less,—will the feverish and selfish activity of par¬ 
ties and factions which it stimulates and feeds be diminished,—by 
giving a four years’ term to eighty thousand additional offices on the 
demand of politicians and office-seekers who declare that every 
man has an equal right to office, and that a quadrennial rotation is 
but yielding to this right ? Having, by proclaiming rotation to be 
a principle of republican justice, provided a place for one office- 
seeker in fifty, shall we be more or less able than before to resist 
the communistic demand of the other forty-nine office-seekers? 
Will it tend to dissuade them from demanding removals without 
cause, or to make them better satisfied that Senators hold for six 
years, and judges during good behavior ? 

It hardly need be pointed out that terms fixed by law would 
advertise to parties, to every office-seeker, and to the feudal lords 


57 


of patronage, the precise dates of every vacancy. He must know 
little of office-seeking, or of partisan methods for controlling ap¬ 
pointments, who does not see that every approaching vacancy 
would be the subject of deliberate and mischievous bargains and 
combinations of influence for filling it. The appointing power would 
be solicited for pledges, men of prominence would be pressed for 
recommendations, party leaders would be besieged for influence, 
every corrupt element and every pernicious activity of politics 
would be intensified beyond anything yet known. For, so long as 
a removal must precede an appointment, there is a great uncer¬ 
tainty as to whether any vacancy will exist, and a concentrated 
effort at a decisive moment is generally impracticable. The ap¬ 
pointing power has some chance of self-protection. An inevitable 
vacancy at a time known months or years before would change all 
this. The potentates of patronage would wrangle over, bargain 
for and apportion every vacancy months before it happened. 

If any man doubt whether a four years’ term for the clerks at 
Washington, and at the custom-houses and post-ofifices, would 
make our politics more feverish and corrupt, let him reflect upon 
the probable effects in these particulars of a one year or six months’ 
term for such offices, as compared with the probable effects of a 
twenty years’ term. Short terms would keep the patronage- 
mongers forever active, the partisan cauldron forever boiling. 
Congressmen would need to give two-thirds instead of one- 
third of their time, as now, to office-seekers; while the long 
term would suppress a large part of our corrupt patronage, and 
would for that reason be fiercely opposed by the worst class of 
politicians. If, possibly, by one extreme, we might burthen the 
departments with a few dotards, it is plain that by the other we 
might, for lack of experience, arrest the public work and make 
office-seeking and office-brokerage a great business of the country. 
Whether the fixing of any term as a substitute for a tenure, con¬ 
ditioned on good behavior and efficiency, and hence subject to the 
stern duty of removal for cause, would be a gain, is the decisive 
question. If any term is to be fixed, it seems plain that it should 
be one which recognizes neither the theory of rotation nor the 
claim of equal rights to office, irrespective of superior merit. 




S8 


But it may be fairly said that the friends of a fixed term do 
not favor one of four years, but a longer term,—perhaps one of six 
or ten years. I must think the vast majority of them prefer a term 
of only four years, and that for the very reasons which prevailed 
in 1820 and 1836. I must also think it unsafe to expect that Con¬ 
gress will establish any other. It has never yet given its assent to 
a longer term than four years. That body neither knows nor has 
precedent for any other term. The most partisan journals and the 
most scheming politicians are now demanding a four years’ term. 
And here we may recall the fact, that, when, in 1836, the four 
years’ term was first made applicable to postmasters, the Senate took 
to itself the confirmation of about four hundred of them, being those 
whose compe/isation was one thousand dollars a year and over,— 
which class now, under the test of that law, is increased to eighteen 
hundred and forty. This requires, from mere expiration of terms, 
the confirmation by the Senate of four hundred and sixty post¬ 
masters each year ; and, when the cases of resignations and re¬ 
movals are added, it makes it necessary for that body to act upon 
nominations of postmasters at the rate of two every day of the ses¬ 
sion ! Is it any wonder that great questions of legislation are ne¬ 
glected, that Senators are beset by office-seekers, or that they are 
becoming more and more the partisan chieftains of their States ? 
Have the facts attending these confirmations been such as to 
make it desirable that several thousand more, of the forty thousand 
additional postmasters to which the four years’ term may be ex¬ 
tended, should be brought into that body for confirmation ? Would 
such confirmation secure superior business men for postmasters, 
relieve Senators from office-seekers, or tend to purify and elevate 
municipal politics ? Is an angry debate in the Senate about State 
politics,—such as we have lately seen, over a village postmaster,—the 
best means of securing a good one ? One thing such a change might 
do; it might, within a decade, when ten thousand postmasters would 
be subject to confirmation,—or twenty-five hundred a year, being 
equal to fifteen each day of the entire session of Congress, would 
be pending for confirmation on the executive session calendars, 
with fierce delegations for and against each in the ante-chambers,_ 


59 


render it impossible for the Senate to attend to any other business. 
This would at least produce a crisis. Let a debate arise in Congress, 
and those reasons of 1820 and 1836 will be again vigorously urged. 
How many members, depending, as they do, on party majorities 
and patronage-mongers, will venture to confront such reasoning ? 

But let us look further. Take away such reasons, and upon 
what grounds can a short term be defended ? If ministerial offi¬ 
cials should not go out with an Administration, when and for what 
cause should they go out ? It is quite true that, disregarding the 
quadrennial period, and the whole theory of rotation for giving 
everybody an office, a candid mind may yet favor a short term; 
but for what reasons and upon what grounds fix its length ? Let 
us consider the main points, 

I. The reasons have already appeared why a six years’ term 
would be preferable to one of four years,-as a term of ten or more 
years would be to one of six years. And competent persons 
would doubtless be more likely to take an official place and to 
serve for a moderate compensation under a tenure of six years, than 
under one of four, for much the same reasons that they would still 
more incline to the public service under a tenure having regard to 
merit, which would appeal both to their ambition and to their 
sense of safety. A four years’ or a six years’ term for a young 
man takes him from business experience at an important period, 
and forces the man of family to expense in adjusting himself to his 
position, while it offers to either only a dreary, admonishing un¬ 
certainty, little inviting to a person of prudence or capacity. When, 
after coming into the service at twenty or thirty years of age, a four 
years’ training by the Government as an accountant, an appraiser, 
a mail distributor, as an officer at the Mint, the Assay Office, or 
the Treasury, has made the official skilful, well-informed, and 
valuable as a public servant, it is certainly desirable that he 
should remain at least two years longer; but would it not be yet 
more desirable that he should stay so long as he is the most useful 
man for the place ? What good reason can be given for sending 
away a valuable official at twenty-six or thirty-six, on merely 
showing that he has served six years ? Is it not plain that, if the 






6o 


tenure and the usage should say to him : “ So long as you do- 
your duty promptly and well, and maintain a good character^ 
your means of living will not be taken away, nor your place given 
to another,” he would be stimulated to fidelity in a degree un¬ 
known to him who can hold liis place only time enough to learn 
its duties and to look out for another? The Government will 
never be best served, nor gain the best to serve it, while its offi¬ 
cials are selected or treated as needy birds-of-passage, in mercy 
supported to-day, but told to find a place elsewhere to-morrow. 

2. It may be insisted that the service would not, of course, end 
with the six years, but only terminate in case the incumbent should 
be held unworthy of re-appointment. This theory plausibly presents 
a short term as a kind of substitute for removals. It contemplates 
that, at the end of the service of every one of the fourteen thousand 
executive officials whose ‘period would expire within each year 
under a six years’ term, there would be a special inquest of their 
official conduct, and a just judgment rendered. We need not dwell 
on the magnitude of such an undertaking which makes it chimeri¬ 
cal. If the facts this theory assumes be true, that during the pre¬ 
vious six years the official superiors have been ignorant of the 
merits of their subordinates, such neglect would prove them un¬ 
worthy to decide as to re-appointments. If such merits have been 
known, no special inquiry will be needed, and the unworthy will 
have been or should have been removed. Whose duty would it 
be, in any event, to conduct that inquiry and decide upon re-appoint¬ 
ments, except that of the identical superior officers whose yearly and 
daily duty it now is to keep themselves in that regard fully in¬ 
formed, and to make removals whenever good cause exists ? Since 
that obligation cannot be increased, the change, if any, contem¬ 
plated in official supervision under short terms would seem to be 
one that would excuse its performance until the end of the term. 
Insufficiency, insubordination, neglect of duty for party work, and 
conduct not absolutely infamous, or criminal, perhaps, are to be 
overlooked during the term, because at its end there is to be a 
grand inquest. In other words, the moral and legal obligations of 
officials in the higher places, and the experience and discipline es- 


6i 


sential on the part of those in the lower places, are both alike to 
be reduced to short measure, as a part of the benefits of short 
terms. That this would please the office-seekers, patronage-mon¬ 
gers and partisans most clamorous for such terms, we need not 
doubt. • On any other theory, or any just or defensible theory as to 
removals, it is plain that the unworthy would all be removed before 
the end of the six years and all those left at its expiration would 
deserve re-appointment, which would make the term unavailing for 
any useful purpose. If, therefore, the officials having a duty of re¬ 
moval are to be trusted, the six years’ or other short term is need¬ 
less; and, if they are not to be trusted to make removals, would 
they be improved for the duty of re-appointment by a statute which 
would suggest that until the end of terms they should wink at the 
delinquencies of their subordinates ? The better remedy than 
any short term would be to enforce far more sternly, and, if need 
be, by the aid of stringent legislation, the duty, declared by Madi¬ 
son and implied in the Constitution, to remove for adequate cause, 
and not to remove without it; and by fit reform methods to take 
away the pressure, the threats and the corrupt persuasions which 
now make the proper discharge of that duty so rare and difficult. 
Under such a system^ the unworthy would be warned off as well 
as weeded out from the public service. 

But let us not forget that with fixed terms, either for six or ten 
years, it would be far more difficult to re-appoint valuable servants 
than it would have been to retain them longer if no statute had 
taught the office-seekers and spoilsmen the doctrine of rotation 
and removals without causes. It is unquestionably true, on the 
other hand, that an officer too cowardly to discharge his duty of 
removing during a term may more easily get excused by reason of 
a removal made by act of Congress ; and, so far as that kind of relief 
which first encourages official neglect and then causes it to be forgot¬ 
ten is an advantage, it must certainly be set to the credit of short, 
fixed terms. With the duty of making removals for cause—which 
would embrace habitual inefficiency by reason of age or any other 
cause,—fitly discharged, we should hear little of a life tenure,—which 
is utterly indefensible,—or of a tenure during good behavior merely^— 


62 


which is inadmissible, because not compatible with such right and 
duty of removal. Good behavior and efficiency combined are the 
true basis of tenure for administrative officers. Who but the spoils¬ 
men, the rotationists and the radical partisans,—who but those 
who refuse to allow the supreme objects to be pure, economical 
and vigorous administration,—can object to retaining ministerial 
officers so long as they are most useful for the public service ? 

3. There are doubtless some who think—and, within very narrow 
limits, perhaps not wholly without reason,—that short terms would 
impress upon the officials a new sense of responsibility in addition 
to that felt toward official superiors—a responsibility to the public 
and to public opinion. The fact that the managers of small local 
administrations, open to the view of everyone, in towns and villages, 
and that officers elected by the people feel a wholesome responsi¬ 
bility of that kind, is a natural source of delusion on the subject. 
If that sense of responsibility is reliable, it would be a good reason 
why the eighty thousand inferior Federal officers should be elected 
rather than appointed. The greater parts of our system would be 
indefensible. It is because that theory is illusory, that, under our 
system and under that of every civilized state, such officials are ap¬ 
pointed and governed by superior officers. The popular judgment 
can never fairly decide how far bad administration is due to the 
superior officer or to the inferiors who must obey the instructions 
of those above them, and hence puts the responsibility and duty of 
removal upon the superior—the President, the Governor, and the 
Mayor, whom the people elect, or upon the heads of departments, 
whose terms are for that reason made short. Every attempt by 
the Legislature, through short terms, to substitute for the true re¬ 
sponsibility to the Executive and for the duty of removal a new 
kind of responsibility, is therefore not only a legislative usurpation 
of executive functions, but is an effort both repugnant to our Con¬ 
stitution and demoralizing in its tendency. 

In order that the popular judgment or the Senate should deal 
justly or wisely with a subordinate,—a postmaster, collector, dis¬ 
trict-attorney, and much more with an appraiser, inspector, or 
marshal,—it would need to know, not only the instructions given 


63 


and the liberty and facilities allowed him, but the accounts and the 
many facts which are among the secrets of the departments. 

But, utterly illusory as hopes from a popular judgment on such 
matters must be at its best, short terms in themselves tend to de¬ 
bauch that judgment and to make it less salutary than it would 
become under a stable tenure, such as we have seen that President 
Arthur and all the late Presidents approve. Those terms cause 
a mere preponderating party majority or selfish personal in- 
flence to fill nearly all the subordinate places, and the power that 
gives a man an office keeps him there or dictates his successor with 
equal disregard of character and administrative capacity. 

The shorter the term, the more difficult and unreliable the pop¬ 
ular judgment. Make the term a year or a month, and will any 
candid man say that a popular judgment upon the official con¬ 
duct of him who fills it could exist ? In most cases, the public 
can tell whether the work of an office—but only rarely in a large 
office whether that of a single officer,—be well done ; but its pro¬ 
test and high demand must be addressed to the head of the de¬ 
partment or the President, where only its concentrated voice can 
be made potential,-—if not at once, at least at the next election. 
Who can doubt that a community, dissatisfied for good cause with 
its postmaster, could fir more easily induce a Postmaster-General 
or President, than a Senate, to remove him? For, in the case of the 
superior officer, under a proper system, he would stand alone, with 
all the facts at his command, with public opinion concentrated 
upon him, with sole responsibility for his duties; while the Senate, 
if not dominated by its demoralizing courtesy, acts secretly, with¬ 
out responsibility, by a party majority, and with neither time nor 
means for learning the facts. Almost the last example—that of 
the postmaster at Lynchburg, Virginia, in which the partisan re¬ 
fusal of the Senate’was followed by a suspension of the delinquent 
officer by the President,—suggests the fit answer and illustrates the 
whole system of legislative usurpation of executive functions. 

The worst administrations of later years—corruptions, partisan 
proscription, neglect of official duty in order to coerce elections, 
political assessments, the degradation of the public servants into 


64 


the henchmen of chieftains and Senators, the bartering of places 
for votes,—have not been originated or most practiced by the 
more subordinate officials to whom a fixed term has never been ex¬ 
tended, but have grown up and become most intolerable around 
the great custom-houses and post-offices, at the head of which are 
officers holding for four years, confirmed by the Senate and beyond 
removal, except by the consent of that body—or, perhaps, I should 
say, of the one or two members of it most responsible for the 
wrong-doing of the officers complained of! 

If the thousands of postmasters whose compensation is between 
five hundred and one thousand dollars a year were given a term 
of four or six years, and were added to the eighteen hundred 
and forty postmasters who receive one thousand dollars or more a 
year, so as to be affected by this new kind of popular responsi¬ 
bility, and made subject to confirmation by the Senate, I must 
think that not superior postmasters, but more active politicians, 
would be secured, and that new elements of vicious and fever¬ 
ish activity would be added to our municipal politics in every 
quarter of the Union. All the older States, at least, would have 
from three to four times as many officers, and with changes or re¬ 
appointments of each recurring two or three times as often as now; 
concerning most of whom, at best, there would be the same vigor¬ 
ous working of party machinery and the same mischievous combi¬ 
nation of selfish influences which now distract communities and 
vex Congressmen in connection with the quadrennial appointment 
of postmasters. Few things are clearer in our own politics than 
the fact that the vast majority of ^iich confirmations are determined 
by mere official favor or partisan interests, and not upon any in¬ 
telligent regard for the administrative capacity of the candidate. 
The case of Postmaster James of New York, a public official edu¬ 
cated and elevated by his rare qualifications and the reform 
methods he enforced, is an exception so conspicuous as to arrest 
the attention of the whole country and to make him Postmaster- 
General,—the first example of administrative capacity ever com¬ 
manding the bestowal of that office. 

I must, therefore, regard it as a condition of good postal admin- 


65 


istration to repeal the four years’ term for postmasters, and as 
most desirable not any longer to draw them into the Senate for 
confirmation. And, is it too much to expect that Senators will mag¬ 
nanimously surrender a patronage which obstructs the business of 
legislation in much the same degree that it aggravates partisan 
politics, draws themselves into unworthy contests, and debases the 
Senatorial office ? At worst, it is some consolation to think that 
the time is not remote when mere physical inability to have a par¬ 
tisan or patronage-monger’s contest in that body over each of the 
ten thousand postmasters who, a few years hence, will receive a 
compensation of a thousand dollars or more a year, will compel a 
reform in the public interest. 

A true conception of the functions of a postmaster or a col¬ 
lector would require that the business of their offices should be 
conducted in a manner wholly independent of party politics, and 
would hold it not only an abuse of official authority, but a gross 
violation of the liberty of the citizen, to use the official influence 
of either to control votes or manage parties. A general 

recognition of these simple truths would, so far as these officers 

are involved, solve nearly every problem of practical reform. 

England, in the reign of Queen Anne, by statute made it penal 
for a postmaster “ by word or writing, or in any manner 

whatsoever, to endeavor to persuade or dissuade any elector 
. . . as to giving his vote.” Still upholding that law, it is 

now a part of her postal instructions that “ every person employed 
under the Postmaster-General is prohibited from exerting any in¬ 
fluence either for or against any candidate ; . . . and canvass¬ 

ing within a post-office is prohibited ” on this basis of law. Aided 
by competitive examinations in the great post-offices, and by a 
tenure of worth and efficiency governing promotions and removals. 
Great Britain has, at less expense than our own, secured a postal 
administration unsurpassed in the world and quite beyond any¬ 
thing to which our public opinion yet aspires,—at least, outside 
the city of New York. There, Mr. James, bringing to the work 
rare administrative ability, refusing to remove without cause, and 
adopting the competitive examinations which British experience 


66 


had matured,—examples which his successor faithfully follows,— 
secured results unequalled in this country, and, considering the in¬ 
adequacy of the appropriations for a more complete service, unsur¬ 
passed anywhere. Yet this New York service is quite behind that 
of London, where, in some sections, there are eleven and in others 
twelve mail deliveries a day, while in New York there are in no part 
but nine daily deliveries. But New York has thousands of poli¬ 
ticians who believe in rotation in office, who hold Civil Service 
Reform to be a theoretical, doctrinaire delusion, who really think 
that the city has the most complete mail service in the world, and 
who do not forgive Mr. James for trying to take the letter-carriers 
and post-office clerks out of party politics. 

It is by the means here indicated, which would equally tend to 
raise our postal affairs above local politics in the villages and 
above State politics on the floor of the Senate, and not by mere 
short terms, or by adding postmasters to the confusing and de¬ 
moralizing number of elective officials, that purer and more eco¬ 
nomical administration may be secured. Congressmen who really 
wish to be relieved of so much solicitation about post-offices, of 
which they complain, may vote to repeal the Act of 1836, and for 
a law forbidding any postmaster interfering with elections and 
any removal of a postmaster being made without cause, to be 
stated in writing. These are the first steps toward a real divorce 
of party politics and postal administration. But, if members 
desire more patronage, more venal, pot-house politics, and the 
worst postal administration of any civilized people, I must think 
they can secure them by extending a four years’ term to every post¬ 
master, thus making it necessary to agitate the towns, villages and 
cities by a partisan contest every four years over the appointment 
or re-appointment to each of the more than ten thousand post¬ 
masterships and the many thousand post-office clerkships which such 
law would make vacant, in addition to all those which would be 
the result of removals for cause or without cause,—altogether, a 
revolution far greater than that under President Jackson. 

4. Another reason given for fixing short terms is that it is the 
best that can be done in the present state ot public upinion, which 


67 


is said to demand them. This view is not warranted by the facts. 
We have seen that short terms were an important part of the 
“ spoils system ” upon its introduction, and that they were persist¬ 
ently urged by the defenders of that system, of which they have 
since been a bulwark. They have, on the other hand, been op¬ 
posed by all the great statesmen and by all the ^Presidents who 
have favored a non-partisan civil service. We have seen how, in 
New York and Pennsylvania,—and much the same was true in 
N other States,—the partisanship which forced them upon the Federal 
service as early as 1850 also caused short terms to be extended 
^ to Judges and other State officers. We have also seen that, a few 

> years later, in the same period when the Civil Service Reform was 

first demanded, there was a reaction in the States, which has since 
steadily grown stronger, the effect of which has been to lengthen 
the terms, not only of State Judges, Governors and Senators, but of 
Mayors, Commissioners, and other municipal officers, besides sub¬ 
stituting biennial for annual sessions of Legislatures in most of the 
States. To go back again, under the pretence of reform, in the 
face of such a tendency, to the theory of the laws of 1820 and 1836, 
is as unnecessary as I must think it would be disastrous to the 
country and to the party and administration which should be re- 
responsible for it. That there are a few who, overlooking the fatal 
objection pointed out, honestly think that short terms maybe made 
an agency of reform, has been admitted ; but I must regard the 
great majority of those who favor them as advocates of the “ spoils 
system ” generally, or, at least, of a Jacksonian rotation as a matter 
of principle. With some exceptions, those most earnest for such 
terms have been most intense in their opposition to Civil Service 
^ Reform, and especially to competitive or other effective examina¬ 
tions which would exclude official favoritism and partisan proscrip¬ 
tion in appointments. 

I Their policy is very adroit. They see that some action under 

the name of reform must now be conceded to public opinion. They 
know that the dominant party, by its platforms and its Presidents, 
stands pledged to a more stable tenure. They feel that something 
must be done that will be accepted as a part fulfilment of that 


68 


pledge. They are not willing to surrender their patronage or to 
allow any but members of their own party to enter even the most 
humble places. They therefore say : “Let us fix short terms, and, 
silently ignoring the matter of removals for cause, let us call this 
stability and reform, and persuade the people to accept it as such. 
This will carry us over the stress of public opinion.” 

It is a shrewd movement, and, if ignorant of the history of short 
terms, not a few worthy citizens might trust this seductive nostrum. 
The fact is that, outside the more selfish and partisan circles, and 
the few who have thoughtlessly accepted rotation as justice, which 
demand short terms, there is no public opinion demanding them 
and there are no abuses which they could mitigate. Where in 
the executive service is there too much trained experience ? 
Where dotards drawing salaries they do not earn ? Who will un¬ 
dertake to say that, for every person superannuated in the civil 
service, there are not ten incompetent from inexperience or by 
reason of that natural incapacity which only favor or outside pres¬ 
sure could force into or keep in office ? Which gives the wiser 
suggestions, the valuable services of Mr. Hunter in behalf of pru¬ 
dence and sound diplomacy,—who has been at the State Depart¬ 
ment since 1829,—or the fact that we are now disgraced before 
the world and dangerously embroiled with South American repub¬ 
lics by reason of the inexperience, and consequent rashness and 
blunders, of those who have been conducting our diplomatic 
affairs ? Which does the growing and wise public opinion most 
favor,—-a system which would give us well-qualified consuls, under a 
stable tenure, or that system which, through intrigue and partisan 
favoritism, has so largely filled our consular places with stale poli¬ 
ticians and bankrupt office-seekers, equally ignorant of the com¬ 
merce they are to protect, the laws they are to administer, and the 
language of the people they are to conciliate ? What the growing 
public opinion demands is not rotation, or an everlasting procession of 
partisans and bankrupts through the offices, but that the most 
worthy shall be selected for office, and that they shall be kept so long 
as they are pure and efficient, and no longer. So far as there is now 
any real difficulty in making removals when they ought to be made. 


69 . 


it is due to that same pressure on the part of great politicians and 
members of Congress which crowds the service with their un¬ 
worthy favorites and dependants. The threats and the fawn- 
ings that foist a brawny henchman, a bankrupt cousin, or a 
favorite widow, upon the national pay-roll, are repeated when the 
attempt is made to remove them. Let competitive examinations 
be placed at the gates of entrance to the public service, which 
would exclude the unworthy and bring in those who would have 
nothing but their superior merit to keep them there, and removals 
for cause would be ^asy. And, should any superior officer be 
found delinquent in that regard, he can be impeached, as Madison 
advised; for, when members of Congress and other great officials 
and chieftains shall no longer have the departments crowded with 
their favorites and relatives, and can put no more in at their pleas¬ 
ure, they will no longer, as now, have an interest to prevent the 
arraignment of extravagance and imbecility in the executive ser¬ 
vice. British experience has confirmed the plain suggestions of 
reason on those points. 

5. It has been suggested that, since competitive examinations 
are very offensive to the partisans and spoilsmen, whose patronage 
they would suppress, such examinations might be facilitated, or 
the need of them in a measure superseded, by short terms. I must 
regard the suggestion as being not even plausible; for such terms, 
for all the reasons stated, would surely strengthen every false 
theory and aggravate every abuse against which such examinations 
and every other tending to test merit are directed. The shorter 
the term, the greater the necessity for ability and business experi¬ 
ence upon entering the public service; and the greater, also, the 
need of thorough competive examinations as the best means (A 
selecting the most competent of the applicants. Even those in¬ 
competent at the start may, after some years’ training at the public 
expense, be made serviceable for the public work. But, if the term 
is too short for such education, large capacity must be required at 
the start. Make the term only a month, and the public work 
would be' arrested, unless the standard for admission should be 
raised and a stern enforcement of competition should be made to 


70 


throw out more than the mere dunces While, therefore, competi¬ 
tive examinations could be made to mitigate some of the evils of 
short terms, such terms would make competitive examinations in¬ 
dispensable. 

It is important to clearly perceive that the time when a person 
should leave the public service does not depend upon how he got 
into it, but upon his usefulness there. Whether he got in by fa¬ 
vor, pressure, or through a competitive examination, the question 
of his proper term or tenure is the same. Such examinations, 
and, indeed, nearly all the practical methods of Civil Service Re¬ 
form,—except the demand for the repeal of the short-term acts, 
and for laws against political assessments,—relate to the means of 
getting into the service and to the abuses therewith connected. It 
is only the specious, unwarranted allegations of the spoilsmen, 
which declare a dependence of those methods upon a life tenure or 
long term of office. There is no such dependence. A great por¬ 
tion of the removals without cause are, however, made in order to 
create vacancies into which dependants or henchmen may be 
pushed. And, since, under competive examinations, the place 
would be filled by whoever could prove himself the better man, 
this pushing would avail little or nothing; and for that reason un¬ 
warranted removals would hardly take place, as we have seen to 
be the case at the New York post-offiee. While, therefore, these 
methods would tend to make a tenure more stable by making 
powerless the corrupt forces which cause proscriptive removals, I 
repeat, that the need of applying these methods would increase 
with every reduction of the term of office and every enfeeblement 
of tenure. It is an utter misconception of the subject to claim that 
a permanent tenure of office is an incident of competitive examina¬ 
tion, or any further a consequence of them than this,—that, secur¬ 
ing the better man, they make it more easy and natural to keep 
such men as long as the public needs or desires them. 

But, suppose short-term theories should now prevail; what 
would be the result in the near future ? How long can such 
theories be in force? Population doubles in about thirty years, 
and officers increase yet more rapidly. Men who have now 


71 


reached manhood may live to see more than two hundred millions 
of people in the Union. Almost within the last decade, the Life- 
Saving and Signal Service, the National Board of Health, the Ag¬ 
ricultural Bureau and the Bureau of Education have been added 
to the public service, and these last two will doubtless soon be de¬ 
partments. The ten thousand and seven hundred postmasters of 
1835 had increased to twenty thousand and five hundred in 1855, and 
to over forty-two thousand in 1881. With two hundred millions 
of people, we are almost sure to have nearly two hundred thousand 
postmasters and little short of half a million subordinates in the 
executive service There will still be but one President, but 
one Senate, but one Secretary of the Treasury, but one Post¬ 
master-General, unless we create others to fight off the office- 
seekers and work the machinery of office-filling. Shall we delib¬ 
erately create an official term which will require the refilling of 
nearly a hundred thousand of these places every year, in addition to 
all those that may be made vacant by removals and resignations ? 
Washington could not contain the office-seekers and their backers 
who would swarm there. Could republican institutions stand such 
a strain ? 

Such are the principal reasons urged for short terms and some 
of the reasons which forbid them. There is another objection to 
them which must not be overlooked. They would greatly embar¬ 
rass, if not defeat, any adequate system for promotion based on 
merit or experience. Four successive Presidents, all the best 
administrators in this country,—and notably Postmaster-General 
James and Mr. Schurz,—and every-well governed country abroad, 
have insisted on promotions for merit, tested by experience, as 
most essential to good administration. When, in his late message, 
President Arthur declared that “ positions of responsibility should 
be, so far as practicable, filled by the promotion of worthy and 
efficient officers,” he affirmed a principle to whicli short terms are 
utterally repugnant. These terms are an arbitrary interference by 
the legislative with the executive department, by reason of which, 
at a fixed time, and irrespective alike of the needs of the public 
service, of the merits of those who fill it, and of the wishes of those 


72 


responsible for good administration, the good and the bad cease to 
officiate. Every officer is sent away—in substance, removed,—once 
in four years, without cause. Promotion for merit, on the other 
hand, is based on the theory that an officer is more valuable for his 
experience, and should be retained for that reason; his responsible 
superior should be the judge of the time during which he should 
be retained, of the duties he can best perform, and of the fit reasons 
for his removal. Now, it is quite too preposterous for argument 
to pretend that such experience can be secured in the complicated 
affairs of government if there is to be a quadrennial rotation. The 
very theory upon which such rotation is founded is but a declara¬ 
tion that the paramount aim of the Government is not the most 
competent officers,—is not to stimulate effort, and retain the skilled 
ability it has educated,—but the greatest number of office-seekers 
given salaries and the greatest number of the henchmen and depen¬ 
dants of patronage-mongers furnished with places. For the official 
whom a term of four years’ training at public expense has fitted 
for a higher place, and the head of a department would put there, the 
rotation system gives another politician or favorite to be trained 
and set away every four years. 

But it may be asked whether some evils may not attend the 
observance of the tenure of the Constitution for “ inferior officers/^ 
—a tenure during the existence of good behavior and efficiency,— 
and whether some provision may not be wisely made for those who 
might leave the service poor and superannuated. Under the 
Presidents before Jackson, when that tenure, prevailed, and, 
therefore, before there were short terms, no evils appear to have 
arisen which needed relief. We cannot speak positively of the 
future. It may be that the aptitude and inclination of our 
people for change of calling, and the facilities for saving and for 
securing new employment in this country, will for many years 
prevent that need of legislation on such subjects which, in the 
old and densely populated countries, we know has existed. If 
such shall not be the case, there will be ample time for action years 
hence. No great evils calling for that kind of legislation now 
exist. It is not a good reason for declining to remedy existing 


73 


abuses connected with getting office, keeping unworthy persons 
in office, and putting of worthy persons out office, to declare that, 
perchance, a generation hence, after existing abuses shall be sup¬ 
pressed, there may be in the public service some superannuated 
officers for whom a grateful people may be willing to make some 
provision. We do not refuse to cure the sick or arrest contagion, 
because the future may have an excess of population. Such ex¬ 
cuses are fit only for demagogues who seek to defeat reform by 
appealing to popular prejudice and ignorance. 

Our business men have not, as a rule,—though with increasing 
exceptions said to be advantageous to employes,—yet made pro¬ 
visions for those worn out by faithful labor in their employment, 
and whether the Federal Government can wisely be more paternal 
and humane is a question properly left to the future. Much may 
be said on both sides of it. Our pensions in principle, and our 
retiring allowance in the army and navy, and for Federal Judges, 
directly affirm the justice and utility of making provision for faith¬ 
ful officers worn out in the public service. After putting out the 
flames and purifying the air of the national household, we can take 
ample time for improving its attractions. The older Governments 
generally, and Great Britain with marked success, have made such 
provisions. The British statutes, which give a retiring allowance 
only after ten years’ faithful service, are by no means based on 
a theory of mere benevolence, but are justified as enabling the same 
capacity to be secured for a smaller salary, and as contributing to 
efficiency and fidelity in office,—in fact, as being, on the mere score 
of economy and selfishness, a manifest gain to the j)ublic treasury. 
The salary and the allowance are thought to be hardly more than 
the salary would need to be, on the average or in the aggregate, 
but for the allowance upon retirement. We see the effect of these 
allowances in the smaller salaries of those in the British service, as 
compared with the salaries paid in our service. This experience, 
extending over three-fourths of a century, is well worthy of our 
study, whether we ever have occasion to make similar allowances 
or not; for it will show us a royal and aristocratic Government 
regarding the self-respect and comfort of those who, in humble 


74 


places, serve it faithfully, with a care, dignity and regard for econ¬ 
omy which are not quite universal in this great republic. 

If it be suggested that such allowances befit the paternal care 
of a monarchy, but not the stern justice of a republic, let it be re¬ 
membered that every subordinate in the British service who can 
receive them is by statute compelled to gain his place through 
superior merit disclosed in a stern, open, competitive e;Kamination, 
where neither blood nor influence avail anything; while it is only in 
this republic that a great officer or a politician can privately force 
his blockhead son, his discharged housekeeper, his servile elec¬ 
tioneering agent, or his bankrupt dependant, upon^the public service. 

If there shall be need, there are various ways of dealing with 
the subject. (i.) We may fix an age beyond which inferior 
officers ” shall not remain in the service, thus sternly excluding 
dotage. (2.) We may fix an age after which the salary shall rap¬ 
idly decrease, which would prevent full payment for impaired 
capacity, as well as cause seasonable resignations. (3.) We may 
pay a small fixed sum on retirement, after a prescribed period of 
meritorious service, and before reaching a fixed age. (4.) We may, 
on retirement any time after ten years of such service, continue 
to pay a certain proportion of the salary receivable at the date of 
retirement, which is the British system. (5.) We may, after the 
official has reached a certain age or period of service, retain a per¬ 
centage of his salary, to be paid on retirement, which will cost the 
Government nothing and yet be a provision against want. (6.) 
We may refuse to make any provision whatever on the subject, 
dealing with the public servants according to the severest theories 
of hostile interests and business relations. (7.) Or, if we shall find the 
Executive or heads of. departments refusing to remove in proper 
cases, after the repeal ol the Tenure of Office Acts and relief from 
party and Congressional pressure shall have restored them a real 
liberty to do so, or if any bad effects shall attend a trial of tenure 
based on character, capacity and 'efficiency, it will be easy, if de¬ 
sirable, to establish a term of years, the length of which should bo 
determined in the light of such experience, and not upon the 
spoils system” theories which now prevail. By that time, if 


75 


favoritism and patronage shall have been suppressed, and competi¬ 
tive examinations shall have been some years enforced, there may 
be neither partisan interest nor prejudice enough left to embolden 
demagogues to seek popularity by denouncing as an “ official class ” 
those who, from whatever grade of life, have worked their way 
solely by superior merit, and who can hold their places only so 
long as there shall be no cause for removal. How can that be a 
class, into which no one can be born, through which nothing can 
be taken or transmitted, and in which no one can remain longer 
than he is freely retained because he is the best servant of the 
people ? 

It would be premature to discuss these points. We need, and 
before the time for action shall arrive we may expect, a more inter¬ 
ested public opinion on the subject. Of what use to ask a legis¬ 
lator who believes in rotation, who holds a tenure of merit to be 
un-American,” who promised ten clerkships to carry his last 
election, and demands a consulate and a post-ofifice to carry his 
next election, to consider the subject on the basis of the public in¬ 
terest ? When we better comprehend that the real strength of 
parties is adherence to sound principles and the enforcement of 
good administration,—when we are prepared to make capacity and 
character, and not influence and favoritism, the tests for admission 
to the public .service,—when we have the courage to suppress polit¬ 
ical assessment and the official coercion of elections,—when we be¬ 
come convinced that promising places for votes is the worst form 
of bribery, and that the spoils system ” is as demoralizing to 
a party as it is disastrous and disgraceful to the country,—then we 
shall see that to refuse to retain a public servant, because he is 
faithful and efficient, is to refuse to protect the public welfare, and 
shall be prepared to deal with our retiring public servants upon the 
grounds of justice and sound principles ; but not before. Then we 
shall be able to give due consideration to what contributes to the 
honor, efficiency and economy of the public service,—to what makes 
it attractive to a prudent man with a family dependent upon his 
salary,—to what will give it a high place in public estimation,—to 
what will invite to it young men of promise, by assuring them that 
merit will be the basis of stability and promotion. 


76 


We must first place competitive examinations—real tests of 
merit,—at the gates of the departments and the great executive 
offices, as provided for by the Pendleton Bill, which will suppress 
patronage and bring in more competent officials, who will not be 
the vassals of legislators or politicians. The most unworthy in 
the public service will disappear in a few years, when then the 
great patrons who now keep them there have ceased to be po¬ 
tential at the executive offices. Then will be the fit time for 
dealing wisely with tenures and terms. Until then, we had better 
confine ourselves to the evils which we have, the removal of which 
will greatly diminish the chances and the magnitude of those we 
fear. 


Civil-Service Reform, 

In regal'd to the effects of the present “ spoils ” system in our Civil 
Service, JAMES A. GARFIELD wrote in 1877; 

“ The present system invades the independence of the Executive and makes him 
less responsible for the character of his appointments ; it impairs the efficiency of the 
legislator by diverting him from his proper sphere of duty and involving him in the 
intrigues of aspirants for office ; it degrades the Civil Service itself by destroying the 
personal independence of those who are appointed ; it repels from the service those 
high and manly qualities which are so necessary to a pure and efficient administration; 
and, finally, it debauches the public mind by holding up public office as the reward of 
mere party zeal.” 

How can these evils be remedied ? By admitting applicants to subordinale 
offices in our Civil Service on competitive examinations which shall best test those 
qualities required in the office to be filled. This system will give to every person, 
whether he be Democrat or Republican, an equal right to enter the public service ; it 
will give to our government the wisest and best choice of servants ; it will break the 
power of patronage and cause subordinate offices to be given for approved merit and 
not for ability in controlling votes. 

What will be the effects of this reform ? it will apply only to the subord* 
nate and clerical officers of the government—those whose duties have no necessary 
connection with the policy of the Administration. In 187Q there were 78,180 such sub¬ 
ordinate officers on the rolls of the national government, whose combined salaries 
amounted to $38,772,943. Most of these officers are clerks, and under the reform 
would be appointed by competitive examination. Under the “spoils” system these 
78,180 offices can be used by the party in power to perpetuate its hold upon the gov¬ 
ernment, and can be held out by all political parties as bribes to voters. Hut this 
$38,772,943 represents only a portion of the “spoils” fund of the national f;ovem- 
ment; there is the fund of our States and cities to be added. In New York City there 
are 7,802 persons employed, not counting teachers and laborers, whose salaries amount 
to $8,000,000 annually. Consider the immense “spoils” fund in our national, state, 
and city governments, which is now used to bribe voters, and which will be swept 
awaj'by the system of competitive examinations. Is it not true that the “spoils” 
system causes principles to be forgotten and political parties to be merely machines 
for obtaining and holding office ? 

Is the reform practicable? Ii^ England it has succeeded and has given the 
Civil Service more manly, industrious, and efficient servants. The Bank of England, 
the London and Westminster Bank, the Spottiswoode printing-house of London, and 
other great corporations, have tried the examination system with signal advantage. 
But an example of the success of the reform has been given in our own country. At 
present seventy-six per cent, of the appointments in the New York Cu.stom-ljouse are 
made by competitive examination, and if a man proves himself the ablest applicant, 
he ma}’^ obtain a position, be he Democrat or Republican. 

The Civil-Service Reform Association is endeavoring to bring about the above re¬ 
form in our national, State, and city governments, and invites all patriotic citizens to 
join its numbers and assist in purifying our politics and improving our Civil Service, 

Annual dues for Membership, $2. 

For in/ormaiion and j>amphlets address 

WILLIAM POTTS, Secretary, 

CIVIL-SERVICE REFORM ASSOCIATION tlP i IJRQ i SW B 'nr , 


4 Pine Street, New York City. 



OF CONGRESS 



0 028 


PRESIDENT. 

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 




070 881 1 

VICE-PRESIDENTS. 

BENJ. H. BRISTOW, GEO. B. MCCLELLAN, 

HOWARD POTTER, ^ , JOHN JAY, 

ROSWELL D. HITCHCOCK, ROBERT B. MINTURN, 

OSWALD OTTENDORFER, GEO. B. BUTLER. 


TREASURER. 

JOHN C. ENO. 

ASSISTANT SECRETARY. 
WILLARD BROWN. 


SECRETARY 
WILLIAM POTTS. 


EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE. 

EVERETT P. WHEELER, Chairman. 

IRA BURSLEY, GEO. HAVEN PUTNAM, 

SILAS W. BURT, WM. CARY SANGER, 

EDWARD CARY, ALBERT G. BROWNE, JR., 

CHARLES COLLINS, ORLANDO B. POTTER, 

DORMAN B. EATON, WM. H. THOMSON, 

ELIAL F. HALL, F. K. PENDLETON, 

FREDERICK W. WHITRIDGE. 

' PUBLICATION COMMITTEE. 

E. L. GODKIN, A. R. MACDONOUGH, 

G. W. CURTIS, HORACE WHITE, 

HERBERT H. DRAKE. 

COMMITTEE ON LEGISLATION. 

DORMAN B. EATON, EVERETT P. WHEELER, 

CARL SCHURZ, ORLANDO B. POTTER, 

F. L. STETSON. 


AUDITING COMMITTEE. 


ELIAL F. HALL, 


CHARLES COLLINS. 


COMMITTEE ON FINANCE. 

IRA BURSLEY, WILLIAM GREENOUGH, 

JNO. C. ENO, WILLARD BROWN. 

COMMITTEE ON AFFILIATED SOCIETIES. ' 

E. B. MERRILL, VERNON M. DAVIS. 




